Perplexity x PayPal - Agentic Commerce Gets Real

Perplexity has chosen PayPal to power what it calls “agentic commerce,” letting users complete purchases directly within its conversational interface.

Goodbye Google Ads?

Starting this summer in the U.S., users will be able to ask Perplexity to find a product, book a flight, or buy tickets, and check out instantly via PayPal or Venmo without leaving the chat.

Payments, shipping, invoicing, and tracking will run quietly in the background via PayPal’s infrastructure. This is not a niche or small feature drop. It’s supposedly a clean integration that makes AI interaction operational.

For PayPal, it’s a position in what may become the next distribution layer. If decision-making shifts from websites to inference engines, payment providers risk being abstracted, unless they embed early.

And the timing? Perplexity is reportedly closing a $500M round at a $14B valuation, led by Accel, with participation from Bezos Expeditions, NEA, and Nvidia. That’s a 27x increase in under 18 months. Their ambition is clear: replace link-based search with next-step answers. Coincidence?

A few open questions for European Fintech arise

While AI has been shaped mostly by U.S. players , OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, commerce is more open. Europe remains strong in infrastructure, think; Adyen, Klarna, Mangopay, Primer, and Swan. We own important layers of the stack. We’re not completely lost.

As interfaces evolve, the leverage may not lie in the model layer, but in owning the trust, compliance, and orchestration underneath it. If agentic interfaces become standard, the question is no longer just who owns the conversation, but who enables the transaction.

1) So what does a PSD3-native, AI-integrated checkout layer look like inside a model-driven interface?

2) Which Fintechs are building for a future where conversation, not navigation, drives conversion?

3) And how can Europe position itself, not as the next UI, but as the infrastructure powering whatever interface comes next?

Got answers(?); mp@blackwood.vc

More here: Financial Times & PayPal