Firmly has raised $15 million and launched Ask Agent, a conversational shopping tool for merchants’ own websites, the company announced on November 5. Squarepoint Capital led the Series A, with J.P. Morgan Payments, Mastercard and Samsung NEXT among the participants.

The big change

  • Ask Agent is intended to help shoppers discover products through conversation on a store’s site.
  • Firmly Connect links merchants to external shopping channels.
  • Payment handling and a shopper’s approval experience depend on the integration, not simply on an AI recommendation.

A conversation on the merchant’s site

Firmly says shoppers describe their needs and receive recommendations from the store’s catalog, with current prices and inventory. Firmly says purchases use the merchant’s checkout; in-chat checkout, order status and loyalty vary by store.

Firmly reports conversion gains of up to 18% in early deployments. Its announcement gives no sample or methodology; the claim is unverified.

Connecting the transaction

Firmly introduced Connect in March. The company described a control center for choosing channels and products and managing how they appear. Firmly says it links merchant systems to outside destinations with the merchant’s agreement.

Separately, Firmly’s developer FAQ says its platform leaves the merchant as seller of record, with the merchant’s payment provider processing the charge. Firmly says its vault passes card data to that provider, which returns a payment token. Fulfillment, shipping, returns and refunds remain in merchant workflows; order status can be looked up.

The same FAQ says the destination is responsible for user consent and Firmly does not itself enforce a review-and-confirm step. That is an important boundary for anyone building a shopping surface: the experience presented to a buyer depends on the destination’s implementation. The documentation describes the wider platform and should not be read as a test of every Ask Agent storefront.

Firmly says merchant onboarding depends on the store’s readiness and that pricing varies by solution and volume. BIG CHANGE has not tested the product or payment flow.