Payments giant PayPal gains agentic muscle with Cymbio deal

PayPal’s acquisition of Cymbio, a platform linking merchants’s product catalogs to AI shopping assistants, is a clear signal that online shopping is moving past standard e-commerce websites.

It’s a big move in the world of fintech and agentic AI with PayPal making moves to spruce up its agentic commerce capabilities. Agentic commerce is hard to ignore right now as tech companies like Google make massive investments in making agent-assisted shopping mainstream.

“Acquiring Cymbio’s technology and team will enhance our agentic commerce capabilities and accelerate the expansion to more of our merchants,” Michelle Gill, EVP and general manager of small business and financial services at PayPal, said in a statement. “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.”

Founded in 2015 by Roy Avidor and Mor Lavi, and headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, Cymbio is a platform that connects merchants’ inventory to leading agentic surfaces and other e-commerce channels including marketplaces. As AI agents begin finding products on behalf of consumers, payments will be crucial to close the loop.

“The real winners in the AI commerce race won’t just be those with flashy chatbots but those who can ensure smooth, trustworthy transactions,” Max Zhang, CEO of CTOL Digital Solutions, said in a LinkedIn post.

By acquiring Cymbio, PayPal establishes itself as the link between AI-powered product discovery and frictionless payment checkout, potentially reducing dependence on rivals like Stripe, Zhang added.

As a partner of PayPal since 2025, Cymbio has been helping the company power its store sync capability that makes any merchant’s product data discoverable within leading AI channels as part of its agentic commerce services. Thanks to the partnership, merchants using PayPal are already live on AI platforms like Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot.