The next buyer may not be a person scrolling your website. It may be an AI agent acting for them.
That changes the game fast. Agents can research, compare, recommend, negotiate, and buy without getting tired or distracted. They do not care about your clever headline if they cannot read your data, trust your signals, or complete the task.
Most companies are still building for human attention. The next wave may reward companies that are built for machine decision-making too.
This Ugly Talk gets into the messy part of the Agentic Economy. What breaks when agents start influencing what people buy, which tools companies choose, and which brands get surfaced first?
A panel of fintech founders, AI founders, and fintech executives.
After the fireside chat, we’ll have a Builder Showcase, where 6–8 selected founders will each get 2–3 minutes to share what they’re building.
The pitch
Why you should be in this room.
- Understand what agent-led buying actually means before it turns into another AI buzzword.
- Hear how fintech and AI operators are thinking about agents as buyers, gatekeepers, and infrastructure users.
- See where the real opportunities are: payments, identity, trust, data access, marketplaces, and software distribution.
- Learn what companies may need to fix before agents become part of the customer journey.
- Hear what builders have tried, what failed, and what they are betting on next.
Audience
Who's getting in.
- Tech founders building in the Agentic Economy.
- Fintech founders watching new purchasing behavior, payment flows, and infrastructure needs.
- AI founders building tools, workflows, marketplaces, or agent-ready systems.
- Product leaders thinking about discovery, conversion, trust, and customer experience when the “user” may not be human.
- Operators who want the real conversation before the market has a clean playbook.
Speakers
Featured speakers.
Mordi Shadpour
Uno Wallet Mordi Shadpour is the CEO of Uno Wallet, a Y Combinator-backed fintech building the next generation tap-to-pay wallet for iPhone. Uno becomes your default wallet and automatically chooses the best credit card for every purchase before you tap. Before founding Uno, Mordi worked at Bloomberg and later studied for his MBA at Harvard Business School, where he was an Arthur Rock Fellow. He is focused on rethinking how consumers make everyday financial decisions by combining payments, AI, and automation.
Shengkun Ye
Monid Shengkun is cofounder of Monid. Monid is the OpenRouter for agent tools. It connects your agent to 2,000+ tools & APIs. Your agent discovers, compares, and buys tools at runtime.
Ali Mirzaei
Dimension Studios Ali Mirzaei is the founder and CEO of Dimension Studios, the social commerce company behind Seller OS, an agentic AI platform that replaces TikTok’s native Seller Center with a unified operational command center for brands and agencies. Ali built the #1 shop on TikTok within six months of the platform’s US launch, and Dimension has since operated four #1 shops for clients including Liquid Death, Final Boss Sour, T3 Micro, SquidHaus, Bones Coffee, and more. The company is profitable at roughly $2.5M ARR with multiple product launches planned for 2026.
Dev Chandra
Octen AI Dev Chandra is a growth marketer, ex-startup founder, and Navy engineering officer. He works in growth and developer relations at Octen AI, building its developer community, evaluating products, and organizing events. Previously, he co-founded Startup Intros, a founder-investor investment platform, and served as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Context Ventures. His experience spans AI automation, community building, and nuclear engineering. Dev holds an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University and engineering degrees from Penn State and Johns Hopkins.
Hosts
Who's hosting it.
Alan Zong
UPSCALE X Alan Zong is Co-Founder and Partner at UpScaleX, a San Francisco-based seed fund investing in AI-native applications and commercial innovations. He brings 10+ years of experience across VC and CVC and has been an early backer of multiple unicorns and decacorns. Alan holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and previously led innovation investment at Alibaba International.
Topics
What's on the table.
- What is the Agentic Economy, and where is the hype getting ahead of the truth?
- How do autonomous agents change shopping, software buying, and business purchasing?
- If agents are more goal-oriented than human shoppers, what happens to branding, persuasion, and customer experience?
- What infrastructure needs to exist for agent-led buying to work, including payments, permissions, identity, trust, and agent-readable data?
- Who captures value when new systems form around agents?
- How should fintech companies prepare for agents that influence or execute financial decisions?
- What failed experiments can teach us about where the market is actually going?
Partners
Who's backing this.
UPSCALE X
We don’t just write checks—we roll up our sleeves and build alongside you. Our unique co-building approach means you get hands-on support from day one, with our team working as an extension of yours to accelerate product development, refine strategy, and drive growth. From seed investment to Series A and beyond, we’re committed to being your long-term partner. We invest in founders who are building transformative AI and digital commerce companies, and we provide the capital, expertise, and network to help you scale faster and smarter.
Venue