# ZeroClick raises $55 million to help businesses sell to AI agents Incline, a Stabledash show. Oct 12, 2026. Brian Luscombe. https://live.stabledash.com/shows/incline/episodes/ai-agents-will-buy-your-software-one-cent-at-a-time-Q3ieZv-F1Zw ZeroClick's head of product expects answer engines to start optimizing for purchases rather than answers, and says sellers need storefronts built for agents. ZeroClick, which builds tools for businesses that want to sell to AI agents, raised $55 million in its latest round. In an interview, head of product Brian Luscombe said the company started out equipping agents to buy and then turned to the sellers on the other side of those purchases. ## From buyers to sellers ZeroClick has worked in agent ecommerce for well over a year, starting with a product called Zero.xyz. While building it, the team saw that it needed to go to sellers and businesses and help them optimize for selling to agents. ## Answers become outcomes Brian Luscombe says answer engine optimization will look "less like, does something show up as an answer? And more like, did the outcome get achieved?" Once that happens, he expects more agents to arrive at websites "with the full intent to buy." He says many human transactions today are already driven by agents that point people to a website, and he expects that soon the agent will offer to buy the item itself. ## Unbundling SaaS Brian Luscombe calls agents "extremely rational actors" that can buy at a micro-transaction level. A user who wants 100 leads enriched could have an agent find a pay-as-you-go service at 1¢ per lead, rather than paying for a $199 monthly subscription. ## What an agent storefront needs He describes pricing pages built for agents, with 100 variants, some priced at a tenth of a cent, which he says would never make sense for human buyers. ZeroClick also offers agent analytics that track how many agents visit a site and what they intend to do, plus a personas tool that spins up hundreds of agent variants to move through a site. A free readiness tool at zeroclick.ai/readiness scores how well any website is set up for agentic commerce. Because competitor reports are expensive to run, ZeroClick sells them in a version agents can buy, for example through Claude. ## Growth is the hard part For founders, Brian Luscombe argues that "building is easy," and that this makes growth hard. Large companies that once needed six months to build a feature can now do it in two weeks, so they are harder for startups to disrupt. Founders need a growth strategy built in from the start, he says. ZeroClick is betting that the next stage of answer engines will send agents to websites ready to pay. Brian Luscombe expects those agents to buy at prices and in quantities that never made sense for human customers, and the company is building the storefronts, analytics and tests that sellers would need for that. ## Key takeaways 1. ZeroClick raised a $55 million round, and it builds tools that help sellers get their websites ready for AI agents that come to buy. 2. Brian Luscombe expects answer engines to shift from optimizing for answers to optimizing for outcomes, leaving the human to just say yes. 3. He says agents could unbundle SaaS by paying 1¢ per lead instead of a $199 monthly subscription. ## Chapters - 0:00 ZeroClick moved from agent buyer tools to seller tools - 3:22 Answer engine optimization will shift toward agent outcomes - 8:01 Agent traffic already arrives, but payments and outcomes lag - 11:08 Agent micropayments could unbundle SaaS into pay-per-use services - 13:30 When building is easy, growth and taste are the moats - 17:00 ZeroClick's stack covers storefronts, analytics, intent and agent simulation - 19:53 Readiness tool sends a real agent to test sites - 22:32 Hosts wrap up and plan a follow-up ## Transcript **Host** (0:06) Uncharted territory. Where road maps are useless. Conditions don't negotiate. The terrain doesn't wait. Where opportunity abounds, but so does death. The builders who understand what's coming aren't mapping it. They're already climbing. This is Incline. **Host** (0:46) Man, I love Incline. I love these conversations. Genetic commerce, the Genetic economy, we're early, but it is starting. We have Brian from ZeroClick here, head of product. Brian, great to see you, man. Owen, **Brian Luscombe** (1:00) Great to meet you. Thanks for having me on. We we have such nuanced conversation. **Host** (1:06) Like I said, we've we've dug a lot into the, you know, the pay boxes of the world. People... How can you buy stuff with your agents? But I think the biggest question is, what are people gonna buy? How can businesses be ready for agents to buy from them? And I'm sure you have a front row seat to that. So really with, like... Maybe we'll just, like... Quick intro. What have you been doing? What's the journey been like at Zeroclik? And then we'll we'll dive into this world of AEO, which is ecommerce, and see where it takes us. **Brian Luscombe** (1:36) Yeah. Perfect. So Zeroclik, we've been building in the agent ecommerce space for well over a year now, but it kinda started with another product called Zero dot x y z, where we were equipping AI agents with the crypto wallet and a identity and a search engine to allow them to go and find all of the endpoints that made it so that an agent could buy things online. And as we're doing that, we looked at the other side of that, and we realized, hey. We need to go to the sellers and businesses and help them begin to optimize for being able to sell to agents. **Host** (2:14) So that's where Zeroclic came in. Zero is kind of on the buyer side. Zeroclic is on the seller side. And... Yeah. So unpack that a little bit more because it's... You get... It's like a chicken and the egg problem. Yes. It's like, which ones do do you pursue? Do you get people primed to buy with Muse or Grokbot or Claude, or does there... Does there need to be an ample supply of things to buy first? Like, is that really, like, was kinda like the moment that led to this pivot? Because you're like, hey. The tooling's there. Like, the the... Though... That part is done. Like, how do you think about it from a perspective? **Brian Luscombe** (2:48) Yeah. That was a big part of it. Looking at this and being like, okay. If you give agents the ability to buy stuff online, can they do some pretty cool stuff. But there's a lot of use cases that they still can't quite do without handing it off to a human. But if we can go and get the sellers ready to sell to agents, then we thought there'd be a huge opportunity in terms of providing a lot more value to what agents can do without necessarily needing to go back to the human and ask for an API key, ask for credit card credentials, ask for a series of next steps that kind of break that flow. **Host** (3:22) When... And I... So I have a buddy. He runs, like, an AEO agency. Right? And it's interesting, like, if verticals that they're selling to, there's some, you know, YC backed companies that are, you know, selling data API products, and there's other non Web3 ones that are like, hey. I just wanna show up and chat GBT when somebody's asking about, I don't know, health care So excited. **Host** (3:44) Well, once you said Asia, Brian, **Brian Luscombe** (3:46) like, lit up. What... Is that is that like a business plan? What what makes you so excited about that? It's just a a very good segue into kind of a topic that I'm passionate about. I spent early part of my career working in SEO related products. So the AEO framing and just to, like, layer in this for folks that maybe don't know the acronym, but AEO is just answer engine optimization, like SEO for showing up in AI chat. So I find it very interesting. AEO, the industry all the way up until right now is kind of answering the question, can you show up in AI chat? How can you show up in AI chat? And that's interesting right now. But as we begin to look towards the question of can agents buy things online, and how can agents do more? I think there's a whole new part of this where it ends with AEO showing up in the chat, and it begins with something that I've tried to coin various versions of this, but I don't have the clout to do so. So I'll call it agentic commerce optimization or just optimizing for agent outcomes. So if you're optimizing for agent outcomes, it's things like not just are you showing up in chat as a list of like, hey. These are 10 good providers for data enrichment, but for the next step in that outcome. And as more chat surfaces begin to behave more and more like agents, it'll be less of, here are 10 options for data enrichment, and it'll look more like, here are 10 options for data enrichment. I found two that I can buy right now for you based upon your use case that I'm building with you, and this is the agent speaking. I recommend this one, and it has an endpoint where I can purchase from it right now. Would you like me to go ahead and do that and complete this part of the project that you're building? So the... It looks a lot more like the human starts with a a job to be done, and all they say to the agent is yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. And then it is fully completed. They don't have to go do their own additional research, sign up on a website, add an API key, all that stuff. **Host** (5:50) Yeah. Oh, sign ups. You still have to sign up for access to the MCP, and then you can hook up the MCP with the CLI, and then you can use our service. And, hopefully, you don't run out of usage credits halfway through your build. When you think about this, like, positioning from a business perspective, though, do you think people are approaching it the wrong way? Because it feels like right now there's a lot of this talk of, like, oh, I need to position for AEO and make sure that that's ready to go, and I wanna show up in the chats, but then they're not thinking about this back end. And would you argue that they need to set up the AgenSys storefront first before they invest in AEO? **Brian Luscombe** (6:25) Okay. So, yeah, this is a good question. Back in the early days of SEO, Google kind of optimized for the answers just based upon, like, pure text. Like, was there something relevant on this website? Therefore, I'll serve it. But over time, as that became more and more sophisticated, Google was optimizing for the end user, meaning, like, they were optimizing for the question of does me serving them this website get the job done? So if somebody's looking for, you know, a good database solution, back in the day, it might just be, here's a bunch of... This this person says database solution a 100 times on their website, therefore, sorting it out. And then they optimized for, did certain actions happen on the website after that that suggested that that was a good database solution, that that person liked that database solution provided by Google and therefore is going to use it. I believe that the same thing is going to happen here where the industry of AEO is gonna start looking less like, does something show up as an answer? And more like, did the outcome get achieved? So did what the user asked for not just get answered, but get achieved? It might... And I might ask, you know, what time is it in France? And that's... The the outcome is just an answer. But if I'm asking for, I need background music for this video game that I'm building, then the outcome is you've generated me background music for the video game that I'm using, and I can keep building without stopping from there. Drew, let's You were Paul. Yeah. Was like, pulling up yeah. **Host** (8:01) For sure. I love the energy, by the way. I'll shut up and let you guys run. This is great. Probably honestly, like, as we think about our business, where it's going, and all the topics that we're talking about, is probably the most interesting to us... To me. I'll I'll speak for myself. Like, this shift... I'll pull I'll pull it back up here, but, like, the shift of... Because we we are fans of commerce. Like, we just... We we love studying commerce. I love commerce as a topic of discussion. When I think about what this business is trying to cover and what we believe to be, like, the focus is, like, the following where commerce is going and both the businesses and the technology that are around it. So this is so so interesting to us. So you said there's... Humans still browse, but most web requests now come from machines. Two and three Google searches end without a click. We're kind of talking about this evolution of behavior. I think people are pretty shocked when they actually look at the numbers around automated activity and traffic versus humans. Speak a little bit to this, and then really the foundation it lays **Brian Luscombe** (9:05) for what's next. Yeah. Sure. So at Zeroclik, we're thinking about this in terms of, like, the full suite of tooling that you would need to sell to agents. And so when someone looks at the current block chain volume and says agent to commerce is early or agents aren't yet buying things, I then start with the question, how much of your current traffic is agents? And if you can't answer that, then you then you need to begin by first understanding what is the composition of the current traffic to your website. Because you might already have what I would call agent traffic that has commercial intent on your website, but for whatever reason, there isn't yet transaction volume. And there's a couple, like, offs along that funnel that I think are true. One being not a lot of agents are equipped with nest... Funded methods of payment yet, and there's some really big players in this space, you know, Coinbase, Stripe, Ramp, that are trying to solve for that. So I have confidence that it will get solved. The other is... Kinda goes back to the the current state of AEO, which is given that it's a nascent industry, the sensor engines themselves aren't optimizing for outcomes yet. They're optimizing for, answers. But as soon as thing... As these start these start optimizing for outcomes, the human job to be done, I I think you'll see more and more agents that are showing up with the full intent to buy. So the the last, like, bow I'll put on this thought is I think a lot of human or a lot of human transactions that are happening right now are actually driven by agents. They're just agents that are saying, hey. I have an answer for you. It's go to this website and buy the thing. And this is why AEO is such a big business right now. But Interesting. What that's gonna look like very soon is, hey. I have an answer for you. Would you like me to just go ahead and buy that thing for you? And all the human says is yes. **Host** (11:08) That's a very inverse Wait. One more. I got one more question on this specifically. I don't wanna derail too much. So can you speak from your perspective, Brian, on what people are actual... When when people think about this, I think this... The obvious thing brains go to, minds go to, is like, oh, I'm gonna buy something retail related or something that, like, a human would want to purchase, like a pair of shoes or a handbag. Like, with AEO and AgenTek Search and AgenTek Commerce agents buying things, like, how does the purchasing aperture change or the categorical... Like, thing... Things that become possible to to treat like a product or treat like a sellable asset, how does that evolve in this context for a biz... Like, feel like we don't talk about that enough of, merchants... Categories of commerce for merchants that they can start thinking about selling now Yes. That that before humans wouldn't really be buying? What does that look like? So Took me a while. Took me a while to get there. **Brian Luscombe** (12:18) I think I understand what you're asking, so I'll quickly cover, like, the case, which is the eTom Utah use case is... You get an answer recommending, you know, an air humidifier. I've done all my research in in, you know, Podex, ChatGPT, whatever. I'm ready to buy. Instead of me having to go and spend three minutes clicking around, I just say go ahead and buy. The the other use case, which is I... What you were asking is, are there whole categories of agent purchasable thing that we haven't even thought of that don't exist yet because agents aren't buying things? And I think this is where what I like to describe as I think there's enough opportunity for the unbundling of SaaS. Agents are extremely rational actors that are able to make decisions and purchase things at a micro transaction level. So it might mean that if I wanted to get a 100 leads enriched so that I could have an e... Email for these 100 people in order to email them about my upcoming dinner in New York City, rather than have to sign up for a SaaS platform as a human and pay a $199 fee a month for a tool that maybe I'm only gonna use one time or that I don't have enough volume to justify, I'm actually going to be able to just ask my agent to find a service that does that in a pay as you go manner so that I can pay 1¢ per lead and do this task for a dollar without having to sign up, go API key, not paying for a bunch of bundled functionality that I'm never gonna use. And if these big companies aren't willing to unbundle, then start up competitors will offer the unbundled solution and begin to get agents selecting them because the price is better or it's easier to get the job done. So This was actually a good segue, I think, into what my question was when we think about this from an entrepreneurial perspective. Right? You think about, like, if you go on Instagram right now, you may see all these kids going out, and they're starting a pressure washing business. Right? But when we think about this practically, **Host** (14:18) how do I build a niche business that is unbundled SaaS that I couldn't have built five years ago to position myself as a young entrepreneur in the AgenTic economy? Like, what should I build? What is the AgenTic storefront that needs to be built? There are these very heavy SaaS products? Is this niche stores selling, you know, T shirts? Like like, there... There's a wide range when I think of, like, what could an AgenTex storefront be. Mean, think about all the different stores that Shopify powers. What what is your vision for who... These young, these entrepreneurs, these enterprises, **Brian Luscombe** (14:53) these... Any business really that's building an energetic storefront with zero click? Yeah. So I'll I'll answer that in two ways. The first is kinda looking just at the macro environment of building software. The trend that I'm seeing is that building is easy, and maybe this is slightly controversial. But if building is easy, there's a few major implications of that. The first is that it makes growth really hard. If if everybody's able to build really, like, interesting new products, the differentiator is how do you... How can you grow this product? Because now I can spin out a 100 products in a single start up that would have taken me six months each to build, and... But I need a growth avenue for them. The second is that building with taste will still be a differentiator, but I think that AI will get better at that. And the third is that bigger company... Companies are not as easily disrupted by smaller start ups. And I think that the implications of that are pretty nuanced, and why that's happening is nuanced. But having worked at some really big companies, it's... At the, like, middle layer, you have to do a lot of internal bureaucracy to get budget, to build a new feature that costs six months to build. If you can now build that in two weeks, a lot of that bureaucracy is smoothed over, and you begin to look like an agile startup in terms of what you're able to ship. So as a startup founder, thinking about what you want to build, you're gonna have to think about, like, what can you do in order to look at those three levers and still have a competitive advantage? So good growth is hard. You have to ask from the very beginning what is your, like, built in growth strategy, and why do you think that if you were to build this that it would work? The other would be what sort of taste are you bringing to this? If somebody else can just prompt their same AI to come at... To build the same business, you have to have a differentiator in terms of how it works, the taste that goes into it, etcetera. And then third is, what would prevent a bigger company from disrupting this in a way that they previously haven't been agile enough to do? **Host** (17:00) Brian, as we... So interesting. As we as we think about the progress so far for Zero Click as a business, you guys you guys raised a sizable round. You're building the product, $55,000,000 latest round. What what is the... You know, speaking of building versus growth and, like, how you're approaching it on your side, You mentioned that that zero click today is in and of itself an evolution from where you guys started. Like, how how are you thinking about what's next? And what what does growth look like even though it's hard for you guys as you guys close the year into into the year? But kind of we started with the premise of **Brian Luscombe** (17:40) as the foundational layer, we need to build an agent storefront. And what that means is that if an agent comes to your storefront, you wanna optimize for other things that you didn't need to optimize for humans. Like, human websites are built with a bunch of superfluous marketing copy, forms, buttons, all these things that agents don't need. You need an agent identity and payment solution, and that's where things like x four zero two and MPP become interesting. And then you need to make all of this legible to an agent so that they can make a bunch of rational decisions. And going back to the other point about, like, what new types of business could exist, you can have a pricing page that has a 100 different variants, including ones that are priced at, like, a tenth of a cent. And that would never make sense on a human pricing page, but it does make sense on an agent pricing page, and it could unlock new types of businesses and ways of thinking about your business. So you just note the agent storefront, then you need to layer in the the other core pieces to this, which are agent analytics, so understanding how agents how many agents are coming to your site to begin with. And and then also the other piece of that that I think is really important that is pretty, like, innovative and interesting on the zero click front is what is the intent of those agents? Can you actually begin to understand why that is... Agent is arriving at your site? Is it arriving to summarize your site for an answer, or is it arriving because it's saying, need a I need a background music for a video game. Are you able to provide that to me and for how much? And so then the other angle to this, which I think is quite interesting, is unlike humans, you can almost perfectly simulate agent behavior as they shop on your site. So we built something that we call the 100 agent eval tool, but in production, we call it personas, which is you can spin up hundreds of variants of agents. Like, this one is Claude code with a human behind it that is equipped with a crypto wallet but does not have an identity solution, for example. And you get all these variants, you can send them all at your sites, and you can see, like, my site is Muse ready, but it it didn't work for whatever reason for this model on Codex because Codex, like, threw back a human exception. **Host** (19:53) Is this zeroclick.a **Brian Luscombe** (19:55) I forward slash readiness? Okay. So, yeah, readiness is kind of the the zeroclick.ai slash readiness is a way that you can go right now and put in any website to see how optimized it is for agentic commerce right now. So it's kind of our way to Yes. **Host** (20:15) I'm having an intrusive thought to tell Drew to do sabledash, but then I'm like, this might go bad. **Brian Luscombe** (20:21) Yeah. Yeah. So what we actually do here is we send a real agent to your site, and it begins to go through a series of tests that it's done based upon the existence of your site and what it thinks it is serving. And then sounds back with a report. So nervous. This is also something that comes out of the SEO world. You know? There's those those readiness reports where it's like, optimized is your site for for showing up in Google? Similar concepts here, but in this case, it's actually sending an agent at your site and so asking questions like, can the agent properly read it? Does it know what you're offering or selling? **Host** (21:00) Sell this to all the They do. AEO agencies who are wanting to... I mean, the people are selling just what's happening right now as, like, a monthly package. You know what I mean? Yeah. The agencies themselves would love this. Yeah. Yeah. If you're a AEO agency out there, hit me up. I'm so excited. **Host** (21:20) There's there's a couple of where Okay. But, like, we have no clue what you do. **Brian Luscombe** (21:26) Yeah. Yeah. But it's... If if you're not actually selling something on your website, it might not be, like, the perfect use case. It's more for, you know, websites that are actively selling things. **Host** (21:41) Sounds like, hey. A 100% access with the... It's... And a 100 trust. **Brian Luscombe** (21:48) It sounds like you guys need to work with Zeroclic. This is the perfect tip for for you signing up with Tough Through right here. **Host** (21:57) Is... Well, who We actually... Yeah. Let's chat let's chat tomorrow or Monday or something. There's there's more to be done here, I think. **Host** (22:03) No. That's funny. Hey. This is building in public. Right? Unlock with Claude. What is that? How are doing? **Brian Luscombe** (22:09) You can do this... You can you can build a whole competitor portfolio and see how your competitors are doing, but it's so expensive for us to run that we have it so that it... We have an agent purchasable version of that. So you could actually go to Claude right now and say, hey. I actually wanna see my agent, or I wanna see my competitor score buy it We from zero **Host** (22:32) will be doing this. So interesting. I love I love how practical... Like, I know you guys are, you know, you... Who knows where this product... Like, product growth, financial growth, company growth, like, something like this could be be so many different beautiful versions of itself in twelve to twenty four months from now. Like, I love the approach that you guys have of just like, hey. Let's get people like us, SableDash, like people who are in the conversation. Like, what can we provide that's valuable? Like, how can we, like, continue moving the ball down the field? And then hopefully over time, learn and be able to see, like, how they're thinking and where they're going. And even just what we've experienced here, if you're watching this live, go to 0click.ai/readiness and kinda get a feel for this. Because effectively, you're you're putting yourself in commercial relationships with anyone who does that, and that'll be... You know, building is easy, growth is hard. So there we go. Yeah. Yeah. Love Exactly. So So much. This was really fun, Brian. Thanks for the energy. Yeah. Welcome. Getting to this. I'd love to come back. Let me know. **Host** (23:45) We'll email you separately. Definitely worth a worth a follow-up call. Our our dev is pinging us with a few other things, so definitely worth talking more. But appreciate you being game to come on, and we don't... It's not very often we get to talk with, like, product leads. I think you just provide such, like, an interesting perspective to how you're thinking about shaping the product and where it positions. And I'm definitely gonna be sending this segment once posted to YouTube to my friend at the end. For what it's worth, **Host** (24:11) Stripe got a 64 out of a 100, so I don't feel as bad now. **Brian Luscombe** (24:16) I don't feel as bad. **Host** (24:18) Oh, this is fun. **Host** (24:19) I'm having too much fun. Alright. Thanks for coming on. We'll be sure to let you know next time we're in in... Are you in New York? Or No. We're in was like, this is this is probably some... We work in New York. We're we're getting very familiar with that background. **Host** (24:36) Thanks for stopping Alright. **Host** (24:39) See you, man.