Key takeaways
ZeroClick raised a $55 million round, and it builds tools that help sellers get their websites ready for AI agents that come to buy.
Brian Luscombe expects answer engines to shift from optimizing for answers to optimizing for outcomes, leaving the human to just say yes.
He says agents could unbundle SaaS by paying 1¢ per lead instead of a $199 monthly subscription.
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0:00ZeroClick moved from agent buyer tools to seller tools1 of 8
Summary
ZeroClick's head of product expects answer engines to start optimizing for purchases rather than answers, and says sellers need storefronts built for agents.
ZeroClick, which builds tools for businesses that want to sell to AI agents, raised $55 million in its latest round. In an interview, head of product Brian Luscombe said the company started out equipping agents to buy and then turned to the sellers on the other side of those purchases.
From buyers to sellers
ZeroClick has worked in agent ecommerce for well over a year, starting with a product called Zero.xyz. While building it, the team saw that it needed to go to sellers and businesses and help them optimize for selling to agents.
“What that's gonna look like very soon is, hey. I have an answer for you. Would you like me to just go ahead and buy that thing for you? And all the human says is yes.”
Brian LuscombeAnswers become outcomes
Brian Luscombe says answer engine optimization will look "less like, does something show up as an answer? And more like, did the outcome get achieved?" Once that happens, he expects more agents to arrive at websites "with the full intent to buy." He says many human transactions today are already driven by agents that point people to a website, and he expects that soon the agent will offer to buy the item itself.
Unbundling SaaS
Brian Luscombe calls agents "extremely rational actors" that can buy at a micro-transaction level. A user who wants 100 leads enriched could have an agent find a pay-as-you-go service at 1¢ per lead, rather than paying for a $199 monthly subscription.
What an agent storefront needs
He describes pricing pages built for agents, with 100 variants, some priced at a tenth of a cent, which he says would never make sense for human buyers. ZeroClick also offers agent analytics that track how many agents visit a site and what they intend to do, plus a personas tool that spins up hundreds of agent variants to move through a site.
A free readiness tool at zeroclick.ai/readiness scores how well any website is set up for agentic commerce. Because competitor reports are expensive to run, ZeroClick sells them in a version agents can buy, for example through Claude.
Growth is the hard part
For founders, Brian Luscombe argues that "building is easy," and that this makes growth hard. Large companies that once needed six months to build a feature can now do it in two weeks, so they are harder for startups to disrupt. Founders need a growth strategy built in from the start, he says.
ZeroClick is betting that the next stage of answer engines will send agents to websites ready to pay. Brian Luscombe expects those agents to buy at prices and in quantities that never made sense for human customers, and the company is building the storefronts, analytics and tests that sellers would need for that.
Google, ZeroClick, Stripe, and X come up most.
- People
- Brian Luscombe
- Companies
- ZeroClick
- Stripe
- X
- Coinbase
- Ramp
- Shopify
- Anthropic
- Dfns
- OpenAI
