CartAI shipped its developer API after more than a year of development, targeting the gap between AI agent navigation and actual transaction completion.

The startup addresses what founder Manil Uppal calls the universal stopping point for AI agents: reaching checkout but being unable to complete purchases. Most browser automation can navigate websites but cannot handle payments, while payment APIs can move money but cannot navigate merchant sites.

The platform operates through four integrated products covering the full transaction lifecycle. Catalog provides product search and live pricing across merchants with checkout estimates. Checkout completes orders on live merchant surfaces with tracking to confirmation. Payments offers PCI-compliant sessions through Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay. Monetization captures affiliate commissions automatically across 70,000+ brands.

How CartAI handles bot detection

The company cooperates with major bot detection services rather than evading them. CartAI works with Cloudflare, HUMAN, Akamai, and Fingerprint through Web Bot Auth and signed agent identity using Skyfire's infrastructure.

Developers can integrate CartAI in three ways: full autonomous agent operation, embedding the agent into existing app workflows, or enabling checkout capabilities on surfaces that previously lacked commerce functionality.

The API handles PCI-compliant payment processing and maintains workflows that terminate in known transactional states. CartAI processes real orders on production merchant sites from a single API call.

The company also released an open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for direct integration with Anthropic's Claude, Cursor, or custom agents.

CartAI targets developers building agents that need transaction capabilities beyond simple web navigation. The platform aims to make any digital surface commerce-enabled through its unified API approach.

Documentation is available at docs.cartai.ai for developers interested in testing the transaction flow.