Agents that optimize investments according to the user's objectives, switch suppliers when market prices change, or do the monthly shopping based on what's missing in the refrigerator—all automatically. This reality, which until recently seemed distant, is becoming increasingly closer with advances in artificial intelligence.
The sea of opportunities opened up by this new technology has sparked a race to connect AI models to payment methods. The competition for this market involves card giants like Visa and Mastercard, as well as the stablecoin market.
It is in this context that Iniciador, a Brazilian fintech company specializing in Open Finance infrastructure, claims to have launched the world's first agentic payment solution based on an instant payment system.
“The money can go from any account to any account, in any bank, and both the payer and the receiver are notified of this process,” says Gustavo Bresler, CPO and co-founder of Iniciador.
The solution relies on two infrastructures created in recent years by the Central Bank: Pix and Open Finance. Pix functions as the instant settlement track, while Open Finance allows an authorized institution to initiate the transaction from other interfaces, outside of the bank's application.
With the payment transaction initiator license, Iniciador can connect different institutions and allow a transaction to be initiated in other digital journeys — such as an e-commerce site or a delivery app.
Based on this infrastructure, the company had already been developing applications such as Pix by proximity and Pix Inteligente, which allows the creation of automatic rules for transactions between the user's own accounts.
Created at the end of 2021, Iniciador already leads the ranking of API calls related to payment initiation in the country — an indicator that measures communications between institutions in Open Finance.
In the last three months, the company had 283 million registrations, according to data from the Central Bank, ahead of Google Pay Brazil, with 162.3 million, and Nubank, with 112.3 million.
In 2025, the company's revenue reached R$ 10 million, four times more than the previous year. Last year, it raised US$ 6 million in its first institutional funding round, led by Valor Capital, and subsequently also received investment from Prosus.
The new frontier for continued growth now is connecting this structure with AI agents.
According to Bresler, credit card-based solutions already exist, but merchants may have to wait weeks to receive payment or pay prepayment fees, and agency payment initiatives with crypto and stablecoins still depend on the tokenization of deposits.
“Other models around the world don’t have this direct connection that Pix already has with all banks in Brazil,” he says. “Pix is as if it has already tokenized all deposits in Brazil.”
The growth of Pix in commerce also reinforces this interpretation. According to the latest Global Payments Report, Pix has already surpassed credit cards in transaction volume in Brazil. By 2025, it will account for 42% of the volume in e-commerce, compared to 40% for credit cards. In physical stores, the share was 34%, compared to 31% for credit.
“We are seeing the beginning of what will be this part of agentic commerce and agentic banking as well,” says Bresler. “Instead of going to a marketplace to compare products, you could do that directly on ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, because it’s a place where you already go to research what’s best for you.”
As an infrastructure provider for the financial market, Iniciador's proposal is to sell the solution to banks, payment institutions, acquirers, sub-acquirers, and digital platforms — the same audience to which it already offers services related to Open Finance.
Bresler states that the company does not intend to create AI agents, but to provide the technological and regulatory layer that allows these agents to initiate payments via Pix.
The strategy behind this model is to free banks and financial institutions from a part considered more operational in Open Finance. According to Bresler, many institutions have assembled their own teams to meet regulatory requirements, but a large portion only needed to dedicate themselves to the maintenance, updates, and integration of the system.
In addition to the technology developed behind the new solution, one of the most valuable assets the company has acquired in its less than five years of existence has been its client portfolio. Among them are Stone, PagBank, iFood, CloudWalk, Banco Genial, Wise, Caju, Núclea, Nomad, and Vindi.
"We can not only take care of all the recurring maintenance, which is the most laborious part of Open Finance, but also help that institution enable, within its products, all the myriad possibilities that Open Finance has to offer."
With the integration of AI agents, Iniciador aims to extend this same logic. Instead of each bank or fintech building the connection between its assistants, Pix, and Open Finance from scratch, the company wants to provide all the infrastructure, freeing financial institutions from the technical aspects so they can focus on developing new products.
