What happens when AI agents become customers?

This episode of the European VC Podcast explores the emerging 'agentic economy'—a future where AI agents, not humans, become the primary customers for digital products and services. Host Nikko interviews Viggo Steinsert, founder of Solvapay, a payment layer designed specifically for agent-to-agent transactions. Despite initial assumptions that fully autonomous agent transactions were months away, Solvapay has already seen urgent demand from early customers, including platforms enabling creators to monetize AI-built data sets and analytics tools. The core challenge, as highlighted, is the lack of existing payment rails for AI agents—traditional systems like Stripe, Swift, and card networks were built for human users, not machine-driven microtransactions. Solvapay bridges this gap by providing identity, authentication, and transaction capabilities that integrate with existing financial infrastructure, avoiding crypto-only solutions that risk disconnecting from reality. The episode also features Redstone partners Michael Bilas and Samuel A. Siren, who explain their early bet on Solvapay based on its visionary thesis, team, and the massive structural shift in payments required for the agentic era. They emphasize that while incumbents like Stripe are moving fast, their legacy architecture makes retrofitting difficult, giving Solvapay a strategic advantage. The conversation ends with a vision of a future where the most valuable companies will be those that own the relationship with AI agents—becoming the 'bank' of the agentic world.