Investing in Orthogonal
Discovery, access, and payments for the agentic economy
We’re leading a $4.3M seed round in Orthogonal to build the discovery and payments layer for the agentic economy.
The Problem
2026 is the first year AI agents such as Openclaw and Claude Code are entering the economy as real participants – writing code, sending emails, and closing tasks end to end. But the moment needs a capability or integration it wasn’t handed to complete a task, it hits a brick wall. An agent can’t go find the right service, sign up, fetch a key, and start paying the way a person would. It fails, or worse, hallucinates results. Anyone who has spent a vibecoding session wrangling dashboards, juggling API keys, and reconciling spend across a dozen providers has felt this friction firsthand.
Today, discovery, access, and payments remain a blocker to agentic workflows. To truly unlock autonomous economic output, AI agents today still need to figure out how to use money and the Internet.
Enter Orthogonal
Orthogonal is building the bridge between agents and the rest of the Internet - creating a unified discovery layer for APIs that allow AI agents to better participate in the global economy. An agent such as OpenClaw and Claude puts in a single integration – whether through SDK, API, MCP, or CLI – and can start to search and discover capabilities it doesn’t have in-built.
Over the past few months, Orthogonal has built up a catalog of hundreds of endpoints from 50+ vendors across a variety of use cases, allowing agents to search for customer contacts, buy compute, generate images, and get access to email and phone numbers. Today, we already see Orthogonal enriching leads for marketing teams, running data analysis for investors, sourcing candidates for recruiters. In a single call, builders integrate once and get everything – a single account with authorization and unified invoicing across every provider, and ability for agents to pay using stablecoins and protocols such as x402.
Meet the Team
Orthogonal has exactly the right team we look for at this layer. Cofounder and CEO Christian Pickett has spent his career building payments and billing infrastructure – payments at Coinbase, usage-based billing at Vercel – and is sharply aware of where the market is today versus where it’s heading. Co-founder Bera Sogut built APIs and autonomous systems at scale, having worked on reCAPTCHA and Maps APIs at Google, and ranks among the strongest competitive programmers in the world. Both cofounders know payments and APIs inside-out, and are in the best position to build the payments and API discovery gateway for the agentic economy.
Our Thesis
As AI agents enter the workforce as full participants, a new agentic economy is taking shape, and we believe Orthogonal will become a cornerstone of the agentic stack.
The tasks of the future will require agents to conduct long-horizon, multi-API, and multi-protocol search, payment, and orchestration. In this world, the layer that decides which tools an agent will go and reach for becomes the layer that gains pricing power and accrues value. This process mirrors the days of the early Internet – search engines captured web traffic flow by making “indexes of the web” navigable through algorithms like Pagerank.
Today, indexes of endpoint services exist out there – standardized by frameworks such as Coinbase’s x402 and Stripe’s Machine Payments Protocol. We see Orthogonal building on top of these to create a navigable “app store” for agents, matching an agent’s intent with the right set of tools and endpoints.
At Pantera, we back the foundational layers that new economies are built on. As more agents than people come online, the Internet needs a front door for getting real things done – and we believe Orthogonal will be it.
Discover, access, pay.
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