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- Key Insights: PayPal has agreed to acquire AI-technology firm Cymbio.
- What’s at Stake: Agentic AI is still relatively new, but payment companies and banks are developing strategies to reach consumers and merchants.
- Forward Look: Cymbio’s team will develop agentic commerce technology for PayPal, including tools to make it easier for AI bots to discover merchants and make payments.
PayPal is bulking up its agentic commerce strategy by taking direct ownership of technology that makes it easier for merchants to connect with AI bots.
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PayPal on Thursday said it has agreed to acquire Cymbio, an 11-year-old Tel Aviv-based technology company that sells e-commerce and artificial intelligence tools to merchants. The deal is expected to close during the first half of 2026, and terms were not disclosed. PayPal is an existing investor in Cymbio and has partnered with the firm to augment PayPal’s agentic AI development. PayPal did not provide comment by deadline.
The agreement is part of PayPal’s increasingly deep dive into agentic commerce, including a recent partnership to support Microsoft’s Copilot Checkout, which shoppers use to choose payments and make payments.
What PayPal is getting
Cymbio’s staff will join PayPal, working on Store Sync, a PayPal product that makes merchant product information and data discoverable in AI channels. Merchants can also use Store Sync to integrate orders into existing fulfillment and product-management systems, retaining customer relationships and control over their brands.
Early Store Sync adopters include Abercrombie & Fitch, Fabletics, Ashley Furniture, Newegg and Adorama, which are live on Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity, another PayPal AI partner. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google products Gemini app and AI Mode will be added “soon,” according to PayPal.
“Acquiring Cymbio’s technology and team will enhance our agentic-commerce capabilities and accelerate the expansion to more of our merchants. By making their product catalogs discoverable on AI surfaces, merchants can increase sales while expanding product choice to the millions of consumers shopping on AI platforms today,” Michelle Gill, executive vice president and general manager of small business and financial services at PayPal, said in a release. PayPal published a blog about AI shopping along with its Cymbio announcement, using the complexity of agentic-commerce protocols as part of its pitch for merchants. “[Merchants] want to invest in agentic commerce but only while retaining control of your customer relationships and data. But many are struggling with where or how to get started,” PayPal said. “The merchants best positioned for agentic commerce won’t try to individually integrate with every platform — or wait it out entirely. They’ll build once and stay adaptable as the ecosystem matures.”
The battle for agentic AI
PayPal has made AI-powered payments a central part of its strategy to boost branded checkout, a metric that investors use to assess the company’s financial performance. The company’s flagship Fastlane point-of-sale system uses AI to help route transactions to the most efficient and economic option, or a form of payments orchestration.
This strategy includes agentic commerce services such as payment support, order management and connections between merchants and product data, fulfillment and AI-powered checkout. Most large payment companies are also pursuing agentic commerce, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and others. By acquiring Cymbio, PayPal is taking more control over the development of technology that connects AI agents to merchants, and is also taking a potential acquisition target off of the table for PayPal’s rivals.
“This is a big win for PayPal,” Richard Crone, a payments consultant and owner of Crone Consulting, told American Banker. “This gives PayPal the product-detail page, which is the most important element in agentic commerce.”
A product-detail page includes information such as features, price and specifications.
In e-commerce, product-detail pages can include 3D renderings and other in-depth product information designed to anticipate questions a consumer may have about a product, and make the purchase more informed.
As e-commerce has grown and taken steps to adopt agentic commerce, product-detail pages are becoming more complex, pushing payment companies to sell technology designed to address the challenge.
Google’s new Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP, which creates standards for AI agents, enables more context for product-description pages, according to Crone. Cymbio’s agentic AI tools reformat a merchant’s product catalogue to make it discoverable for AI agents. For banks and their branded networks like Visa and Mastercard, agentic payments that unlock product-detail page context can turn each intent-based-ping into a verified attribution event worth $1 to $5 per transaction, roughly two to eight times more profitable than interchange, according to Crone Consulting.
“To achieve this, Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay need access to PDPs, and PayPal just acquired the single largest independent source of PDPs outside all the AI superpowers,” Crone said. “Cymbio solves the weakest link in agentic commerce by standardizing, validating and distributing PDPs across marketplaces, social commerce and LLM-driven shopping.”