The news: PayPal will acquire Cymbio, a multi-channel orchestration platform that helps merchants surface products across multiple agentic platforms, per a press release.

PayPal first partnered with Cymbio in October of last year. PayPal merchants will now be discoverable across Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini and AI Mode soon to follow.

Why this matters: PayPal has been building out a deep bench of agentic partnerships and acquisitions to position itself for the future of payments.  

• It notched a partnership with Perplexity in May 2025.
• Mastercard’s Agent Pay integrated into its wallet to facilitate purchases on behalf of PayPal users.
• PayPal and OpenAI inked a tie-up, letting PayPal’s buy button live inside ChatGPT’s interface with Instant Checkout.
• It finalized a multiyear research partnership with Google for agentic solutions.
• PayPal merchants became discoverable within Perplexity ahead of the Cyber Five.
• And PayPal and Stripe integrated their merchant inventory with Microsoft’s Copilot Checkout and processed payments for the platform.

This sets PayPal up to scoop early windfalls from agentic commerce, which we anticipate to crack $20.26 billion in US AI-platform-driven sales this year, per our new AI platform-driven retail ecommerce sales forecast—spiking to nearly 9% of US ecommerce sales by 2029.

Implications for payment providers: AI startup acquisitions stand to give payment providers a competitive edge over rivals. 

Offering the broadest range of discoverability on AI platforms could become a key differentiator for payment providers trying to secure merchant loyalty.