Cole Dermott on Locus: payment infrastructure for AI agents, processing 3,500+ transactions across 80 developer projects

failure, but it wasn't a [snorts] failure. They were just early. they were just early. Uh, and that's the important thing to remember. But we have our next guest here in the Reream waiting room. Let's bring him in from Locus. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Please introduce yourself and tell us what you're building.

Yeah, for sure. So, I'm Cole Dermott. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Locus. We build payment infrastructure for AI agents.

Okay. MCP currently doesn't have payment infrastructure. That's why you exist. Is that's what's going on?

Yeah, basically. Plus trust. Okay. Okay. Trust is a huge part of it.

Okay. Interesting. How are people are people actually like solving this manually right now? Are there are there payment are there like are there like agentto agent payments that are happening right now or is this something where we're thinking like in the future they will all be flowing stable coins to each other in the future?

I think agentto agent isn't really adopted yet. What we're looking at right now is more so developer use cases of um if if you're familiar with X42 paying for API endpoints on a pay-per-use basis potentially doing payouts to people. Y

uh the way I like to explain it is historically payment automation has been deeply rooted in in conditional automation a series of ifs, ends, ors etc.

Now with Aentic payments you open up this new frontier of contextual automation right and that's a pretty huge evolution. Mhm. Um what uh how do you imagine the first adoption of agentto agent payments or or even just payments for agents broadly uh playing out? I I was me and Jordy have been talking about this with the agent commerce stuff. We're using Chat GPT. We're using Gemini. Uh there's all these times when I run into a payw wall and I can tell it's running into a payw wall. It's like a actually I can't tell you about uh you know what's going on on that website. And I'm like no you actually could if I gave you my credit card. I know you could uh but they can't and it seems like that's something you could potentially help with. But how do you see the first early adopters using your service?

I see the first ones as really developers building these um autonomous agents, right? Being able to essentially pay for services as they do their workload in the wild and discover those services autonomously, right? Um, in terms of like the more commerce side, I think that'll be an industry that evolves over the next few years as trust is really developed because frankly on a on a widescale consumer basis. That's really the biggest barrier right now is trust rather than tech.

Yeah. Uh, what kind of numbers did you share uh during your pitch or are you planning to share?

Yeah, so we processed around 3,500 transactions and have around 80 projects built using Locus so far.

Amazing.

That's amazing.

Uh, what were you doing before this? John's got the gong for you. Hit it. Hit it. Then what are you going to do? Uh what what were you doing before this?

Yeah, so I interned at Coinbase. Uh I was one of the people who helped build Coinbase business over there. My co-founder was one of the six software engineering interns at Scale AI.

Uh studied CS at Waterlue, business at Wilfford Laurier, was the financial lead at Waterl Blockchain. So

Waterlue mentioned

fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations

and I'm sure we'll be seeing you soon. Have a good rest of your day.

We'll talk to you soon. Uh, let me tell you about wander.com. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel, great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 247 concier service. It's a vacation home, but better. Uh, and we have some surprise guests, I believe, um, joining in just a second. We will have them in

Jessica and Paul. You may know them. They started a small startup accelerator called Y Cominator.

Yes, that's right. And it's Jessica's second time on the show. We had a fantastic conversation with her the last time she was on the show. We talked about the get your bag culture and the carpet baggers and just all the cultural uh es and flows of Silicon Valley uh and