Stableminded · Aug 13 · 51 min

Agentic Payments: Breeze went from Zero to $4 Billion in Payment Volume in 4 Years

With Millie Yang

Key takeaways

Millie Yang says Breeze crossed $4 billion in annualized volume within four years, after pivoting when FTX collapsed three months after the company started.
Breeze acts as a merchant of record that settles in stablecoins in the middle while customers and merchants deal in fiat, and it claims 95% plus approval rates on first tries.
Millie Yang argues agentic payments are already here in trading platforms, but anti-bot tools such as CAPTCHAs and 3DS stop agents from transacting at checkout.

Watch the episode

0:00Preview of the conversation and a sponsor message1 of 13

Summary

Millie Yang explains how a crypto gaming startup that pivoted after FTX became a stablecoin-settled merchant of record, and why she thinks checkout has to change for AI agents.

Breeze crossed $4 billion in annualized payment volume within four years, CEO and co-founder Millie Yang said in a podcast interview. The company works as a merchant of record: the middle leg runs on stablecoins, while people pay and get paid in fiat.

From Stripe to a pivot

Millie Yang spent four years at Stripe and moved to Singapore to help with its APAC expansion. She describes "impossible battles" to set up banking infrastructure in markets like Indonesia. She started Breeze with co-founder Peng in 2022, first as a crypto payments company aimed at blockchain gaming. Three months later FTX collapsed, and she says those "grand plans" evaporated, which led to the merchant-of-record model.

“I myself love going on Claude to plan a trip and I'm like, take my credit card. And then Claude is like, I won't take your credit card.”

Millie Yang

Approval rates and chargebacks

Yang says Breeze gets 95% plus approval rates on first tries. She puts large enterprises at about 80, 82% or 83%. Part of the gain comes from analyzing card BINs and retrying for problems as small as a cardholder name written in all caps. The company also says it fully indemnifies chargebacks and fights them automatically with AI agents, and gives merchants real-time feedback on declines.

Checkout is not built for agents

Millie Yang says agentic payments have existed for a while on trading platforms, where users fund a wallet and call APIs. Checkout is the obstacle: anti-bot and anti-agent tools mean "the agent isn't able to transact." She says Claude refuses to take her credit card when it plans a trip for her. She predicts machines will charge fractions of a basis point, which she says fiat rails were not built for. Breeze has already published a markdown version of its website for machines.

Where stablecoins fit

Breeze mainly uses USDC. Yang says stablecoins offer settlement in seconds and 24-7 payout liquidity, and they serve foreign merchants who cannot get a US bank account. Her bear case is AI agents finding smart contract vulnerabilities, and she cites a Zcash minting bug. She also positions Breeze for digital goods sellers against Apple, which she says charges 30% for in-app purchases.

AI inside the company

In an internal doc called "Breeze as Intelligence," Millie Yang lays out a goal of going from a sales conversation to an agent building a feature and deploying it to production. She says that after Opus 4.6 launched she vibecoded a vendor's platform herself. The company also ran a month-long AI hackathon for staff.

Yang presents Breeze as a payments operations layer run by agents. It targets fast-growing companies that have not built payments teams, at a time when large enterprises staff such teams with 100 to 150 people. Her message to operations staff is to automate their own work so payments stop being a bottleneck.

Breeze, Stripe, Airbnb, and Apple come up most.

Ask AI about this conversation

More from Stableminded

Get the lineup before every live show, plus the newsletter’s short reads.