We didn't start with a grand thesis about agentic payments infrastructure. We started with a broken demo.
Late 2025. We were building AI agent workflows - the kind where an agent researches vendors, compares prices, and executes a purchase. Standard stuff. The agent worked beautifully up until the moment it needed to actually pay.
That's where everything fell apart.
The moment that broke us
Our agent needed to subscribe to a SaaS tool. Simple task. But to complete it, we had to hardcode a credit card number into the agent's context. Our personal card. In plaintext.
We looked at each other and said: this can't be how it works.
We searched for alternatives. Corporate card APIs that could issue per-transaction cards with spending limits, scoped to one merchant, destroyable after use. Something an agent could request programmatically without ever seeing the actual card number.
It didn't exist. Not for AI agents. Not in Europe.
Existing corporate card platforms are built for humans who log into dashboards. They don't have APIs designed for autonomous software that needs a card for 30 seconds, with a €50 limit, locked to one specific merchant.
The gap we couldn't ignore
The more we talked to teams building with AI agents, the more we heard the same story:
"We just pass our Stripe key to the agent and hope for the best."
"We have a shared corporate card that three agents use. We can't tell which agent charged what."
"Our agent double-purchased a $2,000 annual subscription because there was no idempotency check."
"We turned off autonomous purchasing because we couldn't control it."
Every team had the same problem: agents that could do everything except pay safely. And the workarounds - shared credentials, manual approval for every purchase, disabling autonomous transactions entirely - defeated the purpose of having an autonomous agent.
What we decided to build
Ovra is the layer between AI agents and the financial system. Not a wallet. Not a billing tool. The infrastructure that answers one question: should this agent be allowed to make this payment?
The core idea is simple: an agent never sees a card number. Instead, it declares what it wants to buy (an intent), the system evaluates that intent against spending policies, and if approved, a single-use virtual card is issued for that specific transaction. The agent redeems the card, the payment goes through, and the credential self-destructs.
We call it attestation-before-access. The agent must prove its intent before it gets access to any financial credential. No shortcuts, no fallbacks.
On top of that: a policy engine for spending rules (limits, merchant allowlists, time windows, approval workflows), real-time transaction monitoring, full audit trails, and an MCP server so agents can request payments through the standard protocol.
Why Europe
We're in Berlin. We chose to build EU-native because:
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Regulation is a feature, not a bug. PSD2, GDPR, and AML/KYC requirements force you to build trust infrastructure from day one. That's exactly what agentic payments need.
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The card issuing ecosystem is ready. EU-regulated card issuing partners give us virtual Visa cards with tokenized credentials and full compliance out of the box. We don't need to become a bank.
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The market is underserved. Every US startup in this space is building for US-first. European companies deploying AI agents have no native option.
Where we are now
Ovra is live in sandbox with early design partners across procurement, SaaS management, and logistics. The dashboard gives operators full visibility into agent spending. The API handles the entire lifecycle from intent to settlement.
We're two founders. Pre-seed. Building fast.
If you're building with AI agents and the payment part keeps breaking - that's exactly why we exist.