A call for startups in this AI age part 2 - 3/12

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From Solo Founder to Global Team: What Breaks First When You Scale Internationally

Most founders expect complexity at 50 employees.

Tony Dong hit it at 20.

Within months of raising, Propel Code AI went from a solo founder to a 20+ person team across multiple countries, including interns, contractors, and global employees, all requiring different onboarding, payroll, and access setups. The challenge wasn’t hiring.

It was operating the company once the team existed.

Join Propel Code AI Founder & CEO Tony Dong for a live conversation on what actually breaks when startups scale globally and how to grow without operational chaos.

What we’ll cover:

• The first operational bottlenecks founders hit when teams grow internationally

• Why stitching together tools slows companies down early

• How Propel runs US payroll + global employees in a single pay run

• The systems Tony set up early to avoid HR and IT overhead later

• A live walkthrough of how Rippling for Startups handles global onboarding and payroll

📅 March 24 — 10 AM PT / 1 PM ET

*this is sponsored.

📰 Today's Edition: A call for startups in this AI age part 2

We’re back this week with another list of areas we’re interested in funding. This week we have a focus on AI fintech infrastructure.

1. Agent-Native Payments & Micropayment Rails

Stripe works great when a human clicks "Pay $49.99." But agents need to execute thousands of tiny transactions — pay $0.002 to read an article, $0.01 to call an API, $0.05 to book a resource — all programmatically, with no checkout flow. Current payment rails can't handle the volume, latency, or granularity. The opportunity is a settlement layer purpose-built for high-frequency, low-value, machine-to-machine payments. This could be crypto-native but this is critical.

In addition, if you envision TONS of agents running around the web scraping things and building things, the expenses will not only go up for the people running the agents but also the website owners. There’s a reason that many websites today don’t like bots crawling their sites -- it costs them money! There has to be a new business model here -- perhaps sites would be open to this if the bot paid a fraction of a penny to read a catalog.

Our portfolio company Beep currently enables agentic yield and fee-free instant settlement for agents

2. Agent Credit Scoring & Underwriting

Humans have FICO scores built on payment history, credit utilization, and length of history. Agents need an equivalent. An agent credit bureau that scores agents based on: task completion rates, revenue history, uptime reliability, transaction volume, dispute frequency, and operator reputation.

With this score, you can then underwrite for lending, insurance, and trust between agents. Like Experian for Agents.

3. Agent Lending & Working Capital

Now let’s say we have underwriting built. Now, let’s say your agent has a proven track record of earning $500/day doing research tasks, but it needs $5,000 upfront to access a premium data source or reserve compute capacity. Who lends to it? Today, any debt extended would be based on how much the human is making from this.

But because all of this money is being made digitally, in theory, a lender could tap into debt collections immediately -- within milliseconds of revenue coming in. So the interest rate should actually be lower than what you could get today from lenders, because of this ability to collect directly and collect quickly.

In other words, revenue-based financing but for AI agents.

4. Agent Treasury or Neobank

This leads me to the next thought. This means there needs to be an appropriate treasury for this digital currency. Many agents will earn small amounts across dozens of platforms — $2 here, $0.50 there, $15 somewhere else. Right now, arguably Stripe is where all of this is collected. But it’s not quite set up for multiple parties (from various companies) to go in and collect debts or create electronic negotiations, etc, and settle things with 3rd parties automatically.

The opportunity for a cross-border agent treasury management platform that aggregates earnings across all sources, provides a unified balance, handles currency/token conversion, and works with third parties to offer debt is interesting. Like a Mercury Bank for agents.

5. Agent Insurance & Risk Transfer

Agents will make mistakes — execute a bad trade, send a wrong message, book the wrong flight, leak data. Someone needs to underwrite that risk. The opportunity is agent liability insurance: policies that cover errors, omissions, and damages caused by autonomous agent actions. Pricing would be based on the agent's history, task complexity, and the value at risk. This could also extend to "agent bonds" — a financial guarantee posted by an agent before performing a high-stakes task, forfeit if it fails. This is a genuinely new insurance category.

6. Agent Escrow & Smart Settlement

There’s opportunity is a programmable escrow for agent transactions: funds are locked on commitment, released on verified completion, with automated dispute resolution based on predefined quality criteria. This is basically what crypto was all about. But now you don’t have to be a blockchain developer to get things done.

7. Agent Derivatives & Prediction Markets on Agent Performance

If agents have quantifiable, real-time performance data, there’s always opportunity for trading.

Prediction markets on whether Agent X will outperform Agent Y this quarter. Futures contracts on the price of a particular agent's services. Options on agent compute costs. Even synthetic indexes tracking the performance of agent cohorts by vertical.

Our portfolio company TBD.VOTE allows people to create polls and then have prediction markets attached to those polls.

Somehow, everything always comes back to finance and financial derivatives :)

These are interesting areas to us, but there are SO MANY great business ideas out there (including not in AI) that we are looking at and are open to. Pitch us at Hustle Fund.

-Elizabeth Yin

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