Wildcard
YC W25San Francisco, US · Founded 2025 · 4 employees on LinkedIn · Hiring · 2 known investors
Wildcard helps ecommerce and retail teams monitor how their products appear in AI shopping systems, identify improvements needed, and measure the impact on commercial outcomes. The platform connects product visibility insights to catalog work and sales metrics as shopping increasingly shifts to AI-mediated discovery.
Also known as agents.json · wild-card-ai · Wildcard AI
Founders & leadership· Y Combinator alumni (W25)
Wildcard was founded in 2025 by Kaushik Mahorker.
Investors · 2
Company profile
researched Aug 2026Wildcard is a San Francisco-based software company that describes itself as a full-stack answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) platform for ecommerce and retail brands. The product tracks how a brand, its collections, and individual products appear inside AI-generated shopping answers on ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Walmart Sparky, and Alexa+ Shopping, with Amazon Rufus listed as in beta. Brands connect a catalog from Shopify, BigCommerce, Salesforce, WooCommerce, or a PIM such as Akeneo or Salsify, after which Wildcard builds a ranking baseline against buyer prompts that carry stated monthly search volumes.
Beyond measurement, the platform produces a remediation roadmap and uses agents to draft the underlying work: enriched product data and structured attributes (including what the company calls "conversation attributes" describing when, why, and for whom a product is the right answer), collection pages, blogs, FAQs, JSON-LD, plus press outreach and Reddit and YouTube source opportunities. Drafts are human-reviewed by default, with optional automation. Wildcard also reports sentiment, brand rank, and share of voice, and ties AI referral sessions to add-to-carts, checkouts, and revenue by AI surface using both first-click and last-click attribution. Enriched catalogs are formatted into provider-ready outputs for destinations including OpenAI, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude.
The company states it is building a "command center for agentic commerce," including support for emerging standards such as the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) and Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP). Wildcard participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch, with Gustaf Alstromer listed as primary partner.
Founding story
Founder and CEO Kaushik Mahorker was previously an engineering manager at Scale AI, where he led the GenAI Allocation team and built an ecommerce enrichment engine that structured 2.4M attributes across 400K SKUs for the company's largest pilot, work he says helped close $15M+ in retail and marketplace contracts. He was earlier an engineer on AWS Elastic File System and holds a master's in computer science from UCLA and a CS undergraduate degree from UCSB. The current direction followed roughly seven months of conversations with brand owners, which led the team to conclude that AI recommendation outcomes are driven by structured, trustworthy catalogs and the content AI systems retrieve at query time rather than by model training.
Business model
B2B SaaS sold to ecommerce brands, retailers, and agencies. The website offers a free trial, a no-login free AI visibility audit, and a "talk to a founder" sales path, indicating a self-serve plus founder-led sales motion. Specific pricing is not disclosed in the sources.
Software subscription to a platform covering AI visibility tracking, catalog enrichment, content generation, and revenue attribution; sources do not disclose pricing tiers or contract values.
Traction
The company reports 20+ brands live and an average 5x increase in AI search revenue after 30 days. A published customer case study for Dosaze claims 540% AI-attributed revenue growth in 60 days, brand presence rising from 1.16% to 23.25%, and a #1 source rank by June 2026. The predecessor agents.json repository has about 1.3k GitHub stars. All figures are company-reported.
Latest developments
In July 2026 the founder said a larger public launch was scheduled for the following week, with the platform then serving 20+ brands and covering visibility and rank tracking, PDP optimization, content and PR outreach, and revenue attribution. The company says it is building tooling for emerging agentic commerce standards (ACP and UCP) and is hiring a founding engineer and a founding applied ML engineer in San Francisco.
▸Full profile — market position, technology, go-to-market, geography, history, risks & controversies
Market position
Positions itself as purpose-built for ecommerce and retail AEO/GEO rather than a generic brand-monitoring tool with a commerce module, arguing that competitors stop at a visibility score while Wildcard also executes the remediation work. It differentiates from traditional SEO tools such as Semrush by measuring product and brand recommendations inside AI answers rather than webpage rankings.
Catalog-level rather than homepage-level unit of optimization; agent-drafted, human-approved content and outreach across owned and third-party surfaces; conversation-attribute taxonomy mapping product facts to buyer intent; provider-ready catalog outputs; and closed-loop revenue attribution by AI surface. The company also cites planned support for ACP and UCP agentic commerce standards.
Technology
Catalog ingestion from commerce platforms and PIMs, an enrichment pipeline that normalizes product truth and adds conversation attributes grounded in approved evidence (the company states it does not invent product claims), prompt and topic coverage scoring, provider-specific output formatting via feed, API, structured-data, or publishing paths, AI agents that draft content, and an attribution layer connecting AI referral sessions to commerce and analytics stacks.
Go-to-market
Free no-login AI visibility audit and free trial as top-of-funnel, direct founder outreach, a Y Combinator launch post and video, and distribution through brands, retailers, and agencies. Integrations with Shopify and other commerce platforms serve as an onboarding channel.
Ecommerce brands, retailers, and agencies, particularly those managing large catalogs with thousands of SKUs and variants. The company contrasts its focus with tools built for SaaS marketers.
Geography
Headquartered in San Francisco, California, with open roles listed in San Francisco. No other offices are described in the sources.
History
Wildcard was founded in 2025 and went through Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch. Its first product was agents.json, a tool-calling protocol intended to make APIs usable by AI agents, launched in early 2025; the associated open-source repository remains on the company's GitHub organization. The founder has said that protocol is no longer actively maintained. In November 2025 the company relaunched around agentic commerce and AEO/GEO for ecommerce, and a broader public launch of that platform was reported as imminent in July 2026.
Risks & controversies
Public information is thin and largely company-authored: traction, revenue-multiple, and case-study figures come from Wildcard's own site and YC launch materials rather than independent verification. The company has pivoted once, abandoning its original agents.json protocol, and its current market depends on third-party AI shopping surfaces whose ranking mechanics, feed access, and standards (ACP, UCP, Amazon Rufus) are controlled by external platforms. Funding data found in aggregator listings appears unreliable and conflates the company with unrelated entities of the same name.
Compiled by commissioned research from 8 cited public sources — announcements, filings, and press listed under research sources below.
Key figures
latest reportedCompany-reported or press-reported figures, each dated to when it was claimed — not independently audited.
Timeline · 3
launches, deals, and filingsThe American Bazaar reported on 2026-07-17 that a public rollout of the platform was scheduled for the following week, with the company then working with 20+ brands.
Founder Kaushik Mahorker said the company relaunched in November 2025 as a different company focused on agentic commerce, helping ecommerce brands get products discovered and purchased through AI shopping assistants.
Wildcard's original product was agents.json, an API/tool-calling protocol built during Y Combinator and launched in early 2025. The company states it no longer actively maintains the protocol. The open-source agents-json repository remains on the company's GitHub organization.
Dated company events from announcements, filings, and press; legal rows summarize public dockets and regulator releases.
In the news
▸Research sources · 8
primary sources listed
- Wildcardwild-card.ai · web
8 public sources were cited for this profile; the first-party ones are listed here.
Frequently asked questions
- What does Wildcard do?
- Y Combinator-backed platform that helps ecommerce and retail brands get their products recommended by AI shopping assistants.
- Who founded Wildcard?
- Wildcard was founded by Kaushik Mahorker in 2025.
- Who are Wildcard's investors?
- Wildcard's investors include Y Combinator, Paradigm.
- Where is Wildcard headquartered?
- Wildcard is headquartered in San Francisco, US.