(Jan 22): PayPal Holdings Inc agreed to acquire Cymbio, a platform designed to help merchants sell products across artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots. Terms weren’t disclosed.
The acquisition is the latest step by the payments platform to become a one-stop shop for merchants planning to sell through chatbots that consumers are increasingly turning towards to discover products. In October, PayPal launched a suite of agentic commerce services intended to help merchants adapt to evolving consumer shopping behaviors as the industry expects AI-enabled shopping to become more popular. The acquisition of Tel Aviv-based Cymbio is expected to close in the first half of this year, PayPal said in a statement.
PayPal provides tools like a catalog and order management platform to help merchants’ make their products discoverable across chatbots. The company sells these services as a way for merchants to reach more buyers while maintaining control of their brand’s visibility for agent-initiated transactions. Abercrombie & Fitch, Fabletics and Ashley Furniture are already using PayPal’s agentic commerce tools on Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Support for Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini app and AI mode in search are coming soon.
“By making their product catalogs discoverable on AI surfaces, merchants can increase sales while expanding product choice to the millions of consumers shopping on AI platforms today,” Michelle Gill, the executive vice-president and general manager of small business and financial services at PayPal, said in the statement.
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