Locus

Locus builds payment and billing infrastructure for AI agents. Its self-serve product, Pay With Locus, gives an agent a non-custodial USDC wallet on the Base blockchain that can be funded and governed with spending controls such as allowances, budgets, approvals, approved vendors and required justification, with a complete audit trail that records agent reasoning. From that single wallet an agent can call a catalog of pay-per-use API providers (AI models, search, data, maps, audio and media) without creating separate provider accounts or managing API keys; each provider ships a "skill file" describing how the agent should call it [0][1][4][6].

The second product, Locus Pro, is an enterprise billing layer for agent platforms. A customer funds a wholesale prepaid pool, curates which APIs from the catalog to enable, sets a default markup with per-endpoint overrides, and resells the same catalog to its own end users in a credit denomination it chooses (default 1 credit = $0.001). Calls are metered per request: credits burn atomically at the customer's price, the charge and remaining balance are returned in response headers, underfunded calls are refused with HTTP 402 before any money moves, every burn requires an idempotency key so retries do not double-charge, and failed upstream calls refund automatically. Each burn is written to an append-only ledger row with the full price breakdown, filterable by end user, API and customer-supplied attribution metadata [0][1][2].

Money can flow three ways: the customer buys wholesale and spends it internally; the customer bills its users on its own Stripe account as merchant of record while Locus returns the markup portion to the wholesale pool; or Locus acts as merchant of record through hosted checkout and the customer withdraws accrued margin to a Stripe account or USDC address after a holdback window. Delivery surfaces include a Node SDK (@withlocus/credits), a REST/curl interface, an MCP server usable from Claude Desktop, Cursor or other MCP clients, and a drop-in React balance and top-up widget [0][1][2].

Founding story

According to Startup Intros, Locus was founded in 2025 by Cole Dermott and Eliot Lee; Dermott previously worked on B2B payment products focused on control and compliance at Coinbase and Lee worked on data pipelines for large AI labs at Scale AI. They concluded that the layer after model intelligence would be control over agent spending and permissions, and built Locus around that thesis. The company joined Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch, with Aaron Epstein as primary partner [4][6].

Business model

Two-tier model. Pay With Locus is self-serve with no subscription or minimum: developers fund a USDC wallet and pay listed per-call prices for API usage. Locus Pro is a sales-led enterprise agreement: an 8-week paid pilot at $15,000 one-time, then a 12-month production contract with a $5,000 monthly minimum (stated elsewhere on the site as a $60,000 annual production minimum), plus a platform fee charged marginally on the monthly provider-cost basis at 5% of the first $100k, 4% of the next $400k and 3% above $500k, with the monthly minimum credited against usage. There are no per-user or per-key fees, provider usage and payment-processing costs are separate, and the customer keeps 100% of the markup spread, which never routes through Locus [0][1][3].

Usage-based fees on metered API calls plus enterprise contract minimums and platform fees; Locus buys API capacity wholesale from providers and settles with them, while customers pay per call or under an annual Locus Pro agreement. Hosted per-call endpoint prices include a disclosed embedded Locus component that is credited dollar-for-dollar so it is not charged twice [0][1][3].

Traction

Public catalog figures state 48 verified API providers with published base prices on the site and pricing page, while the documentation cites a broader catalog of 600+ pay-per-use APIs behind live quoting; the homepage also cites 40+ APIs in one section. Locus endpoints are listed on MPP. Startup Intros reports total raised of $0 and a headcount of 1-10; Y Combinator lists team size 2. External write-ups describe an active beta program supporting USDC on Base with ACH and wire transfers planned [0][1][2][3][4][6].

Latest developments

The site announces that Locus endpoints are now live on MPP (mpp.sh/services). Locus Pro is being marketed as the enterprise billing layer with a published rate card. The YC profile carries a launch post for Locus Founder (locusfounder.com), an agent stack that researches a business idea, performs market research across 40+ paid data APIs, generates branding, deploys a full-stack site, sources products including print-on-demand and a catalog of 500+ dropshippable products, runs outbound email and social, sources leads from Apollo, Google Maps, Reviews, Instagram, YouTube and Yelp, generates short-form video ads, and handles USDC and card payments; it is driven by text via iMessage, SMS, Telegram or web. Locus Founder pricing is limited daily free usage, a $50/month subscription for effectively unlimited access, and 5% of profits only above $1,000/month. A product mention dated 2025-10-31 records "Locus – Payment infrastructure for AI agents" [0][1][4][6].