The financial layer for the agentic era.
AI agents are becoming economic actors. They buy API credits, pay for SaaS, order software, and complete checkouts on the open web. Snap gives them their own payment infrastructure — designed from the ground up for autonomous decision-making.
Why Snap exists
Generic virtual cards weren’t built for a model that decides for itself. They were built for finance teams approving expenses, employees subscribing to software, and procurement workflows that assume a human in the loop at every step.
When you hand those same cards to an AI agent, the assumptions break down fast: there’s no human to approve in real time, the agent might misinterpret the brief, a prompt injection could redirect spend, and a runaway loop can burn through a budget in minutes. The safety controls every other card product offers — monthly statements, manual disputes, post-hoc review — are too slow and too coarse for autonomous spend.
Snap is built for that gap. Every primitive in the product — single-use cards, hard caps, merchant locks, the optional Sentinel review layer — exists because we believe agent-driven payments need a safety story before they need anything else.
Security
Snap is engineered around the assumption that the agent on the other end of every authorization is autonomous, fallible, and potentially compromised. The defenses are layered so that no single failure — including a model jailbreak, a leaked key, or a runaway loop — translates into meaningful financial loss.
No PAN storage
We never store full card numbers. The PAN is shown to your agent exactly once at issuance and is never persisted on Snap servers. Our database holds the last four digits and metadata only.
Network-enforced spending limits
Every spend cap, merchant lock, and per-card limit is enforced by the Visa payment network — not by Snap software. A wrong-merchant or over-cap charge is declined at the rails before it ever clears.
Single-use, short-lived cards
Cards die after one charge by default and auto-expire after their TTL (5 minutes by default, configurable). No orphaned cards, no forgotten holds, no long-lived attack surface.
AES-256-GCM encryption at rest
Every sensitive field Snap stores — API keys, agent identifiers, authorization payloads — is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM. Decryption happens only at the moment of use.
Sentinel — LLM context review
Optional second-opinion layer: an LLM that has read the agent's brief evaluates each authorization request and declines anything off-context. The only safety primitive in the industry that understands what your agent is supposed to be doing.
Instant revocation
Freeze or revoke any card or API key in real time from the dashboard, the CLI, or a single API call. A compromised key stops minting cards within seconds, not minutes.
Per-agent API isolation
Each agent gets its own API key with its own daily caps, merchant scope, and per-card limits. Revoking one agent never affects the others, and a single compromise can never spread across your fleet.
Audit log on every decision
Every authorization, decline, approval, revocation, and Sentinel decision is logged with full context. Filter by agent, export for compliance, or replay for incident review.
Cards are issued by our regulated banking and processing partners, who provide PCI DSS compliance and inherit fraud monitoring at the issuer level. Snap operates as the application layer on top of that infrastructure — the safety primitives above are what we add on our side.
Who’s behind Snap
Snap is independently built and operated. The product is currently in private beta, which means we’re onboarding users one at a time and using their feedback to harden the product before opening it up.
We’re intentionally not backed by a large parent brand or a billion-dollar parent company. Trust in a payments product shouldn’t come from whose name is on the door — it should come from the safety primitives above and the rails the product runs on. That’s how we’re building.
Contact
For partnerships, press, security disclosures, or just to talk — hello@snapfi.dev. Follow @snapfidev on X for updates.