Who Pays and Who Polices? The Fed's Waller on AI Agents as Reco Raises $55m

Tuesday, 29 September 2026. After a day of launches from OpenAI and Meta, the harder questions about AI agents are arriving: how they will pay for things, and who keeps them in check. A Federal Reserve governor has set out his view of 'agentic commerce', and a security start-up has raised fresh money to police agents inside big companies. Here is what is going on.

The Fed's Waller on letting AI agents pay

Fed Governor Christopher Waller used a speech titled 'Payments in the Age of AI Agents' at the Sibos 2026 conference in Miami to map out how AI agents could start buying things on our behalf (Federal Reserve).

• He described two models: 'agent-assisted', where the AI helps you search but you still decide and pay, and 'agent-delegated', where you give the agent authority to shop and pay within limits you set.
• His example of the second: giving an agent a pre-funded virtual card and asking it to buy groceries based on your past purchases.
• He expects consumer-to-business purchases to come first, with agent-assisted uses arriving before fully autonomous ones.
• Business-to-business buying may suit agents especially well, as it is often repetitive and governed by rules such as approved suppliers and budgets. Agents there would need to pay over ACH, wire, instant payment and card rails.
• Large retailers are already working with AI firms to make their product catalogues available to third-party agents.

Reco raises $55m to keep agents on a leash

Reco, a start-up that secures AI agents inside companies, has raised $55 million in additional funding, taking its total to $140 million (Reco press release, TechCrunch via Yahoo Finance).

• AT&T Ventures joined as a strategic investor; AT&T is also a customer. New investors Forestay and Quadrille Capital also took part.
• Chief executive Ofer Klein told TechCrunch the valuation has 'more than doubled' since a $30 million Series B in February, to the 'high hundreds of millions'.
• Reco has more than 100 customers, with financial services making up about 40% of the business. Annual recurring revenue is in the 'double-digit millions' and Klein expects it to triple this year.
• Its software maps what each agent can access across apps, people and permissions, and lets security teams cut off access they do not need.
• Reco cites a Gartner forecast that the average Fortune 500 company will run more than 150,000 agents by 2028, up from fewer than 15 in 2025.

Also today: Spotify stumbles

• Spotify suffered an outage on Tuesday morning, with more than 15,000 US users reporting problems by 10:06am ET, including failed searches, login trouble and 'Something went wrong' errors (Mashable).
• No cause has been confirmed.

Sources

• Federal Reserve - Speech by Governor Waller on payments in the age of AI agents
• Reco press release (GlobeNewswire) - Reco raises $55 million in additional funding
• TechCrunch via Yahoo Finance - Reco raises $55M as AI agent security startups crowd the market
• SecurityWeek - Reco raises $55 million for agentic security
• Mashable - Spotify down: why it's not working for thousands