Ideas beneath
the surface
Investing in Payman
2025 will be the year of the AI agent, but agents won’t be capable of performing all tasks asked of them this year. They may never be capable of doing everything a human does.
That’s why we invested in Payman in Deepwater Venture Fund II.
Payman is building a network of available workers (agents and humans) married by a payments infrastructure to handle compliance, validation of work, and simple tools for developers to build agents into their platforms.
We estimate that AI agents could be a $1T+ market opportunity driven by millions of consumers spending a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per year for access to agents. To deliver real value, the agents must be deeply functional, which is where Payman adds value by making sure a wide array of tasks can be completed by agents, even if it requires human labor:
- Payman’s go-to-market strategy is to start demonstrating use cases with AI agent developers. To demonstrate use cases, Payman will also create some applications via their own “Labs.”
- Many of Payman’s initial users are humans excited to work with AI agent platforms that will need human labor. We view strong initial interest as the spark of a potential outcome where Payman can create not just the technology infrastructure for agent-to-human and agent-to-agent payments, but also a network effect created by humans interested in a new AI-driven economy.
A comprehensive AI agent offering needs to be able to handle any function lest consumers lose belief and trust in the agent’s ability to function; we expect Payman will fill that critical void in current AI agent functionality.