Cole Dermott on Locus: payment infrastructure for AI agents, processing 3,500+ transactions across 80 developer projects
Dec 3, 2025 with Cole Dermott
Key Points
- Locus, a YC-backed startup, is building payment infrastructure for AI agents by adding a native payment and trust layer to the Model Context Protocol, which currently lacks both.
- The company has processed 3,500+ transactions across 80 developer projects, targeting developers who need pay-per-use API infrastructure rather than consumer-facing agent commerce, which Dermott expects to take years.
- Dermott shifts the framing from conditional payment automation to contextual automation, where agents discover and pay for services dynamically as they work, positioning trust as the primary barrier to agent-to-agent adoption.
Summary
Cole Dermott is building Locus, a payment and trust layer for AI agents. The pitch starts with a gap in the Model Context Protocol: MCP has no native payment infrastructure, and Dermott argues trust is the equally significant missing piece.
The current use cases are developer-side rather than consumer-side. Developers building autonomous agents need to pay for API endpoints on a pay-per-use basis and handle payouts, roughly analogous to the x402 micropayment pattern. Dermott frames this as a shift from conditional payment automation (if/and/or logic) to contextual automation, where an agent can discover and pay for services dynamically as it works.
Agent-to-agent payments aren't meaningfully adopted yet. Dermott expects consumer-facing agent commerce to take years to develop, with trust the primary barrier rather than technical capability. The near-term opportunity is developers, not end users.
Locus has processed 3,500+ transactions across 80 developer projects so far.
Dermott's background anchors the founding thesis: he helped build Coinbase Business during an internship there, and his co-founder was one of six software engineering interns at Scale AI. Dermott also studied computer science at Waterloo and business at Wilfrid Laurier, and served as finance lead at Waterloo Blockchain.