Payle, Mattia, and Finding My Startup Spirit Again

There are projects you work on because they make sense.

There are others that you look at and almost immediately think: I need to be part of this.

Payle was the second kind for me.

A few years ago, I joined an online community of builders. I wasn't looking for a co-founder. I wasn't really looking for another startup either. I already had my own projects, university, work, Northline, ScopePilot, and enough things competing for my attention.

Then I came across Mattia Ciuni and Payle.

Mattia had shared what he was building openly: an infrastructure layer that would allow AI agents to spend money while remaining constrained by rules defined by humans.

It immediately caught my attention.

Not because "AI agents" are fashionable right now, but because underneath that idea was a very real infrastructure problem.

If software is going to increasingly make decisions for us, eventually some of those decisions involve money.

And the moment money enters the equation, everything becomes harder.

Who authorized the transaction?

How much is the agent allowed to spend?

What happens when a payment needs additional authentication?

How do you prevent duplicate transactions?

How do subscriptions work when the amount changes every month?

Who carries the credit risk?

What happens when an agent tries to buy something outside the rules its owner established?

Those were the kinds of questions that made Payle interesting to me.

And instead of simply telling Mattia that I liked the project, I started digging.

From a comment to building together

One of the first things I challenged was part of the BNPL model.

A traditional installment system works well when you know that something costs €300 and you want to divide it into three €100 payments.

But agentic commerce won't always look like that.

Imagine an AI agent managing infrastructure, APIs or SaaS products where consumption changes every month. Maybe the bill is €200 this month, €600 the next and €350 after that.

There is no fixed amount to split beforehand.

That conversation eventually pushed us toward thinking about aggregated spending budgets and credit lines designed around variable consumption rather than trying to force traditional BNPL mechanics onto a completely different type of buyer.

Mattia wrote about that moment from his perspective too. His version of how we met is probably one of my favourite things anyone has written about working with me.

But what he couldn't really write from my side was what I was seeing in him.

The person behind the idea

There are many people with startup ideas.

And there are many technically talented people.

What is much rarer is finding someone who is extremely organized, relentlessly consistent and actually executes.

That was the first thing I noticed about Mattia.

We would discuss something and, instead of it disappearing into an endless list of "things we should eventually do", it would move.

Documentation appeared.

Architecture changed.

Questions became tasks.

Tasks became decisions.

Decisions became code.

And then we moved to the next problem.

We started talking practically every day.

Payments. Issuing. Credit. SCA. 3DS. Idempotency. Banking partners. Regulation. Agent authorization. Product decisions.

Some conversations lasted minutes. Others turned into long discussions where one question created five more.

And I loved it.

I had forgotten a little bit how addictive that feeling could be.

Getting the startup feeling back

I've built products before.

I've launched things that people paid for. I've worked on fintech systems. I've co-founded a software studio. I've spent more nights than I'd like to admit debugging deployments, designing architectures and wondering whether some idea was worth another month of work.

But somewhere along the way, building can become very rational.

You start thinking about infrastructure costs.

Customer acquisition.

Revenue.

Deadlines.

University.

Client work.

Everything becomes another item in a project manager.

Working on Payle brought back something I hadn't felt this strongly in a while.

That stupidly exciting feeling that this thing could become enormous.

Not because success is guaranteed—it obviously isn't.

But because the problem is interesting enough that you want to find out.

I found myself researching companies, payment infrastructure and regulatory questions when nobody had asked me to.

I'd see something during the day and immediately think: this matters for Payle.

That's when I realized I wasn't really "helping Mattia with his project" anymore.

Somewhere in those conversations, it had become our project.

Complementary obsession

Mattia and I approach things differently, and I think that's one of the reasons it works.

He has a very strong product instinct and an almost obsessive ability to organize an idea into something that can actually ship.

I naturally gravitate toward the infrastructure underneath it.

How do we build this?

How does the payment flow behave when something fails?

What does the regulatory model look like?

What happens at scale?

Where are the edge cases?

What happens when the clean diagram meets the ugly reality of financial infrastructure?

And instead of those perspectives competing, they reinforce each other.

The best conversations we've had aren't the ones where we immediately agree.

They're the ones where one of us says:

"Wait. This doesn't work."

And then neither of us is satisfied until we understand why.

A surprisingly important part of building together is finding someone you can disagree with productively.

Payle

Today, I'm building Payle with Mattia as Co-founder and CTO.

We're working on the money layer for AI agents: infrastructure that lets autonomous software transact while humans remain in control through budgets, policies, authorization rules and financial safeguards.

There is an enormous amount left to solve.

Payments.

Issuing.

Credit.

Compliance.

Risk.

Agent identity.

Authentication.

Developer experience.

Probably another hundred problems we haven't discovered yet.

That's exactly why I'm excited about it.

I didn't join another startup because I needed another title or another project.

I joined because I saw something I genuinely wanted to exist.

And because I met someone whose energy, organization and work ethic reminded me why I loved startups in the first place.

A few weeks ago Mattia was simply someone whose post I found in an online community.

Now we're building a company together.

Funny how quickly things can change when you find the right project and the right person at the same time.

Let's build Payle.