Terry KS Mastercard is expanding its Start Path program to support startups driving agentic commerce, as AI-powered agents move rapidly into mainstream digital payments. The initiative reinforces Mastercard’s focus on trust, interoperability and secure standards as the foundation for scalable, intelligent commerce.
MALAYSIA, 22 JANUARY 2026 – Mastercard is stepping up its push into agentic commerce by expanding its Start Path startup engagement program, aiming to support the next generation of intelligent, trust-based digital commerce. The move comes as AI-powered agents rapidly transition from experimentation to real-world commercial infrastructure, reshaping how consumers and businesses discover, compare and complete purchases.
At the core of Mastercard’s strategy is the belief that speed in digital commerce must be underpinned by trust. Just as shared rules and expectations enable smooth coordination on highways, payments rely on long-established frameworks that ensure predictability, security and confidence across the ecosystem. As commerce becomes increasingly agent-driven, maintaining these shared standards is seen as essential to preventing fraud, misaligned intent and system breakdowns.
To support interoperability in this emerging environment, Mastercard is collaborating across the industry on open protocols that allow AI agents and merchants to interact securely and transparently. These include partnerships with Google on the Universal Commerce Protocol, as well as contributions to initiatives such as Google’s Agent Payments Protocol and Agent2Agent Protocol, OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Protocol and other cross-industry efforts. Together, these frameworks aim to ensure clear user intent, verifiable agent identity and secure credential handling without adding friction to the payment experience.
Mastercard is also advancing its own agentic capabilities through Mastercard Agent Pay, launched last year to deliver more secure, personalised and intelligent payment experiences. The company is now working with Microsoft to integrate Agent Pay into Copilot Checkout, while continuing collaborations with partners such as OpenAI, Cloudflare and PayPal to further develop intent-driven, secure agentic commerce solutions.
The expansion of Start Path is designed to complement these large-scale partnerships by engaging innovative startups building technologies for agentic payments and commerce ecosystems. Since 2014, the program has supported more than 500 companies across over 60 countries, many operating at the forefront of AI. Participants gain access to Mastercard’s global network, tailored collaboration opportunities and pathways to accelerate adoption of new products and services in emerging agentic environments.
As intelligent agents increasingly shape the future of commerce, Mastercard is positioning trust, standards and collaboration as the foundations that allow innovation to scale at speed while preserving confidence across the global payments ecosystem.