Kumar Senthil

Startup Spotlight: Kumar Senthil, Firmly CEO - A Commerce Infrastructure Layer in the Agentic AI Era

What does it take to build infrastructure for a world that didn't fully exist yet? In this episode, Kumar Senthil, CEO and Co-Founder of Firmly, shares how he spent five years quietly building the plumbing that lets AI agents discover products and complete purchases on behalf of consumers, all while keeping the merchant in control of their data and customer relationship. Kumar recounts the long, often painful journey of solving a two-sided marketplace cold start problem, being laughed out of VC meetings, operating under NDA for years, and finally breaking through with the just-signed lead for their Series A. In…