American payments giant PayPal has acquired retail technology start-up Cymbio as it looks to bolster its AI capabilities.

Cymbio, which uses AI to help merchants build multi-channel customer experiences, worked with PayPal in 2025 to develop and roll out a range of agentic commerce services.

PayPal has been investing in agentic AI, intelligent systems that can make decisions on behalf of humans, as it looks to boost customer acquisition and sales.

The firm is positioning itself as the bridge between e-commerce companies and major AI platforms. Its existing agentic commerce capabilities, enabled by working with industry experts like Cymbio, currently support the Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity AI chatbots.

Support for ChatGPT from OpenAI and Google Gemini, both for its app and AI Mode, is set to roll out soon.

Michelle Gill, general manager of small business and financial services at PayPal, said the acquisition of Cymbio will allow PayPal to leverage the startup’s AI technology to improve the payment giant’s agentic AI offerings as it looks to reach more merchants in a fast-changing market.

“By making their product catalogues discoverable on AI surfaces, merchants can increase sales while expanding product choice to the millions of consumers shopping on AI platforms today,” she said.

In particular, PayPal hopes to leverage the technical prowess of the Cymbio team to expand Store Sync. Using this agentic commerce service from PayPal, merchants can bring their products to AI channels and ensure customers using AI tools can easily find them.

When orders are generated through AI channels, Store Sync ensures they’re added to the fulfilment systems already used by merchants.

The service is currently used by major retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch, Fabletics, Ashley Furniture, Newegg and Adorama.

PayPal’s acquisition of the Tel Aviv, Israel-based tech start-up will conclude sometime over the next six months, though finer details like closing conditions and financials weren’t announced publicly.

This is the latest agentic commerce-related announcement made by a major financial services firm in recent days.

This week also saw Revolut ink an agentic commerce partnership with Google and Mastercard to support the development of agentic commerce start-ups.

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