Atlanta Startup Agentix Wants To Bring Checkout Into AI Chat

ATLANTA, July 6 (Hypepotamus) – Commerce won’t start with a search. It will start with a prompt, says Atlanta entrepreneur Hussain Punjani. 

That’s the future that Punjani is looking to build with Agentix, a recently-launched startup creating the infrastructure to let shoppers complete a purchase right from their AI conversation. As more consumers turn to ChatGPT, Claude, and other LLMs to research products, Agentix wants to be the layer that makes checkout-in-chat possible.

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 How Agentix Works

Right now, the checkout experience breaks the moment a product search moves from an LLM to an e-commerce site. A shopper finds what they want inside a chat, gets redirected out to the merchant’s website, and then has to navigate clicks, forms, and log-ins…just to finish buying something they’d already decided upon on a separate page.

Agentix’s pitch is to collapse that entire sequence into a process that happens entirely inside the LLM itself.

Punjani told Hypepotamus that there are plenty of tech companies out there that help brands get discovered inside AI search results. But Agentix goes beyond the research phase, working with ecommerce platforms and working throughout the ecommerce transaction process. Instead of pitching individual merchants one by one, Agentix goes upstream and partners directly with the e-commerce platforms those merchants already run on. Punjani describes the company’s role as acting “as the agentic managed service provider on behalf of the e-commerce platform to enable the integration and connection.” One integration with a platform means every merchant on that platform gets access to checkout-in-chat, without having to build anything themselves.

Punjani added that Agentix works as “invisible infrastructure,” running behind the scenes of the ecommerce process. The business model pairs a monthly subscription with a revenue-share split on completed transactions. In its early stages, the startup (which is currently raising its pre-seed round) is focused on customers including online retail, event/appointment/travel services, restaurant platforms and merchants.

 Meet the Agentix Founder

Punjani, a graduate of the University of Georgia and Emory University’s MBA program, built his career inside fintech and payments giants before starting Agentix. His resume includes stops at InComm Payments, FIS, Visa (where he served as Director, Global Product Strategy & Operations) and AIG (where he worked in AI Product Management & Strategy on the generative AI side).

Even with his corporate background, Punjani told Hypepotamus that starting a company of his own was always the plan.

“I always knew I wanted to do my own business and my own startup and do something that was my own. I was just waiting for the right opportunity,” Punjani said. That opportunity arrived with the AI-driven shift now reshaping how people shop, he added.

Where Shopping Goes Next

Punjani said that “Ai-enabled agentic commerce” gets him excited about the future of the industry.

“Agentix is enabling a massive growth opportunity of seamless “prompt-to-payment” infrastructure. By bridging that gap, we are able to drive net-new revenue growth for mid-sized e-commerce platforms and their underlying merchants, allowing them to capture intent right at the moment it happens inside the LLM conversation,” he added. “We see agentic commerce exactly where e-commerce was in 2000, it’s following similar customer adoption patterns. We want to work with e-commerce platforms and merchants to take advantage of this opportunity.”

Longer term, Punjani is building toward something bigger than a smoother checkout button. He described the company’s North Star as “agent-to-agent commerce.”

The Southeast’s Ecommerce World

The Southeast, especially Atlanta and Charlotte, has long been a FinTech (financial technology). One growth area has specifically been in the ecommerce and commerce technology-focused startup space. Alongside Agentix, other active startups in the region to note include Deliveri, Krepling, eStreamly, and SmartCommerce.