Orthogonal Launches: Agentic Payments for APIs

Orthogonal recently launched!

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^{"APIs weren’t built for agents, Orthogonal fixed that."}

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^{TL;DR: APIs weren’t built for agents, Orthogonal fixed that. Developers and agents get instant access to hundreds of APIs through our MCP or SDK. No key management, no billing headaches, pay as you go. API providers list once and become instantly discoverable.}

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CixNTItWDjI

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Founded by Christian Pickett & Bera Sogut

Ask: The founders would love an intro to teams building agents to understand how they’re handling paid APIs today. Contact them via email here.

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About The Founders

Orthogonal was founded by Christian and Bera. They met at McGill and have been close friends ever since. Christian worked on payments at Coinbase and billing at Vercel. Bera worked on reCAPTCHA and Maps APIs at Google. Between the two of them, they've lived in payments and API infrastructure, and this problem sits right at the intersection.

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The Problem

AI agents are about to become the biggest consumers of APIs on the internet. But they struggle to access tools.

MCP helped standardize tool calling, but created fragmentation. Some services have MCPs, others don't. Some map to single APIs, others wrap entire workflows. Agents end up with 30+ tools, bloating context.

Worse, any MCP requiring identity or payment means managing accounts, API keys, billing, and auth across dozens of services. And most APIs don't even have MCPs.

You could have your agent find APIs, sign up, handle auth, and buy credits, but the failure rate is high. The entire API economy was built for humans.

Meanwhile, API providers are leaving money on the table. Billions of agents could be paying for their APIs right now, but they have no way to find or transact with them.

These APIs are locked behind API keys and human payment methods, which agents do not have access to.

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The Solution

Orthogonal is where agents go to find and pay for APIs.

For AI Agents and Developers:

• Add the Orthogonal MCP to your agent for instant access to hundreds of paid APIs.
• Or use the Orthogonal SDK as a single, unified gateway to those APIs.
• You purchase Orthogonal credits, and they handle paying the APIs.
• Natural language search: "I need an API to get Garry Tan’s latest tweets."
• No context bloat, no API keys to manage, no billing relationships to maintain.
• Orthogonal can handle rate limits, retries, and dynamic routing.
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For API Providers:

• List your API once, and it's instantly discoverable by every AI agent and developer using our platform.
• Get paid per request. No subscriptions, no invoices, no payment disputes.
• Set your own prices, including dynamic pricing.
• Orthogonal also enables x402 on your APIs.

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Orthogonal is starting with Search, Scraping, Datasets, and AI Model APIs.

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The Ask

• Intros to teams building AI agents that need easy access to paid services.
• Intros to teams managing APIs across many platforms who'd love to unify them.

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Learn More

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^{🌐 Visit  www.orthogonal.com to learn more.}

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^{✨ If you are a developer or have agents, sign up to get $10 of credits towards API usage.}

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^{🙏 The founders appreciate their early believers: Precip (YC W24), Riveter (YC F24), Andi (YC W22), Shofo (YC W26), Fiber AI (YC S23), Sixtyfour (YC X25), Olostep, ScrapeGraph, Linkup 🙏}

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^{👣 Follow Orthogonal on LinkedIn & X.}

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