Founder Mitchell Jones announced on Aug. 6, 2025, that his startup, Lava Payments — a digital wallet that enables merchants to use usage credits for transactions in an AI-driven web — has raised $5.8 million in a seed funding round led by Lerer Hippeau.
According to TechCrunch, Lava aims to simplify payment processes and developer workflows by building a solution for the modern web, where AI agents increasingly handle transactions on behalf of users. The funding will go toward hiring, product development, and go-to-market strategies.
“We see the world as very interconnected,” Jones told TechCrunch, explaining how his product differs from its competitors. “What we’re really focused on is building [for the] agent-native economy.”
Jones launched Lava after departing from his Y Combinator-backed fintech startup, Lendtable, and diving into AI development. While building a basic form-filling agent, he spent over $400 and repeatedly ran into the same issues — starting new subscriptions, re-authenticating, and making redundant payments — even though he already had access to the core AI models.
“That felt fundamentally broken,” Jones said, TechCrunch reported. “I didn’t want to keep rebuying access to the same thing under a different wrapper. What I wanted was a single wallet, one set of credits, and the ability to move between tools and providers without starting over every time so I could pay for what I was using.”
With Lava, customers load credits into a wallet that work seamlessly across multiple merchants and AI services, enabling autonomous AI agents to transact without human intervention — on a “pay-as-you-go” basis.
Instead of needing separate payments for each tool, users buy a single credit balance that agents can charge as they complete tasks.
“Without Lava, agents can’t move smoothly through the internet because they constantly get blocked when it comes time to pay,” Jones said, per TechCrunch.
For example, he explained, users don’t pay Google every time they open Maps — they’ve already paid for internet access through their mobile carrier.
As Jones aims to streamline the payment infrastructure and make it more developer-friendly, he envisions Lava as the “invisible layer that kind of powers the AI web,” per TechCrunch.
