Mastercard is expanding its start-up engagement programme to advance agentic commerce and services.

The card payments giant has begun accepting applications for Start Path from companies specialising in AI-powered payments, agentic experiences, autonomous transactions, identity and intent verification, and advanced security.

Launched by Mastercard in 2014, Start Path provides successful applicants with direct access to its partners and customers so they can bring their new ideas to market and distribute them globally.

The programme, which is delivered virtually, has so far supported over 500 companies across 60 countries and facilitated more than 15,000 connections.

After completion, these companies have gone on to raise a collective $25 billion of capital.

Applications for the next cohort are currently open. When selecting applicants to take part in the programme, Mastercard looks for innovative products that deliver tangible benefits for customers and that feed into its strategic and business objectives.

It also expects companies to have raised investment and launched profitable products, and considers the backgrounds of their founders and teams, preferring people who love what they do and are ready to scale their products.

Strategically, backing agentic start-ups seems like a logical step for Mastercard as it continues to ramp up activity in the area. In April 2025, it announced an agentic payments solution called Mastercard Agent Pay, aimed at merchants, their customers and payment issuers.

Through a Microsoft partnership, Mastercard hopes that users who buy products via the Copilot chatbot - utilising a feature called Copilot Checkout - will soon be able to make payments using Mastercard Agent Pay.

Mastercard has also inked a series of agentic commerce partnerships with OpenAI, CloudFare and PayPal as it looks to bring agentic commerce into the mainstream.

Additionally, it has been working with Google on the Universal Commerce Protocol, which was launched by the American tech giant earlier this month to ensure frictionless communication between AI agents and merchants.

In a blog post, Pablo Fourez - chief digital officer at Mastercard - said: “Intelligent agents can accelerate the pace of commerce only if the foundation beneath them is predictable, secure and universally understood.

“That’s why we’re building the standards, partnerships and capabilities that allow innovation to move at full speed without losing the coordination that keeps the system flowing.”

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