A German startup wants to rebuild online commerce for shoppers who are not human. ShopAgentic has raised a €1.9mn pre-seed to do it. May Ventures and Greenfield Capital co-led the oversubscribed round.
What ShopAgentic is building
ShopAgentic calls itself a “native agentic commerce system”. It runs a squad of specialised AI agents, each owning one job: catalogue, pricing, customer service, or fulfilment. The merchant sets the strategy and keeps control, while the agents execute.
The product works alongside a brand’s existing systems, or as a standalone. The company says brands can start within a normal innovation budget, with no multi-year rollout. It is aiming hardest at the roughly half of e-commerce that runs on custom-built systems.
The pitch: agents change who buys
Earlier shifts changed how people shop, from mobile to marketplaces to omnichannel. ShopAgentic argues the agentic shift changes who shops. AI assistants now handle discovery, comparison, and checkout on the shopper’s behalf.
Today’s storefronts assume a human works every lever, the founders say. Platforms built for human browsers, they argue, will not serve agents well. ShopAgentic wants brands ready for software that reads structured data, transparent pricing, and live inventory.
“The entire front door of e-commerce is being rebuilt, and ShopAgentic is the system on the other side of it,” said co-founder and chief executive Alexander Ringsdorff.
Who is backing it
May Ventures, an AI-native German fund, co-led the round. Greenfield Capital, a European blockchain investor, co-led alongside it. Greenfield backed the deal on a bet about agent-to-agent payments.
“Agents don’t shop the way people do, and before long they won’t pay the way people do either,” said Greenfield principal Claude Donzé, pointing to stablecoins as a natural fit for how agents transact.
A long list of commerce veterans joined as angels. They include Spryker founder Boris Lokschin, former eBay Germany and OTTO chief Stefan Wenzel, and Exciting Commerce’s Jochen Krisch.
The founders’ track record
Alexander Ringsdorff and Kai-Thomas Krause have launched at three commerce turning points. They built CouchCommerce as mobile shopping emerged, then co-founded the omnichannel platform NewStore in 2015. ShopAgentic, founded in December 2025, is their bet on the third wave.
The caveats
The numbers are small and early. This is a €1.9mn pre-seed in a company a few months old, and the product is pre-launch. The cash will fund development, integrations, and hiring before a wider rollout.
The market case also rests on a forecast, not results. Deloitte projects that AI agents will enable 25 per cent of global e-commerce sales by 2030. Whether ShopAgentic captures any of that remains to be seen, and its wider launch is the next test.
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