Marco Vinciguerra
We're thrilled to announce that ScrapeGraphAI has partnered with Orthogonal (YC W26), a company that's fundamentally reimagining how APIs are discovered and consumed in the age of AI agents.
The Problem
AI agents are about to become the largest consumers of APIs on the internet. But the entire API economy was built for humans, and agents can't participate in it.
An AI agent can't browse a marketplace, fill out sign-up forms, enter payment information, or manage API keys. Every API provider is leaving money on the table because there's no infrastructure for agents to become customers.
Enter Orthogonal
Orthogonal asked: "What would the API economy look like if it were designed for autonomous agents?"
The answer is built on x402, an open payment protocol from Coinbase that enables instant stablecoin payments directly over HTTP. When a request arrives without payment, the server responds with HTTP 402, the client pays in USDC, and retries. No accounts, no credit cards, no invoices. This is what makes true micropayments finally viable.
For AI Agents:
- Natural language discovery: Search for APIs like "I need a service that extracts structured data from websites"
- Automatic payment: Pay per request via x402, no accounts, no API keys, no billing relationships
- One-call execution: Discover, pay, and use APIs in a single request
For API Providers:
- Pay-per-request economics: Agents pay per request, you get paid per request
- Instant settlements: USDC paid directly to your wallet—no invoices, no 30-day terms
- Zero overhead: Orthogonal handles discovery, authentication, and payments
Why This Is Revolutionary
Traditional API marketplaces are directories with payment portals attached. Orthogonal is fundamentally different, it's a real-time marketplace where discovery, evaluation, and transaction happen atomically.
Think about what this enables:
- An agent researching a topic can discover and pay for web scraping in the same second it needs the data
- A customer service bot can find and use a translation API for a language it's never encountered before
- An autonomous trading agent can discover and subscribe to real-time data feeds without human approval
- A research agent can use dozens of specialized APIs in a single workflow, paying for each only when needed
This isn't just convenient, it's the infrastructure that makes truly autonomous agents possible.
Why We're Partnering
At ScrapeGraphAI, we've always believed in making web data accessible to everyone, humans and agents alike.
By listing on Orthogonal, our scraping APIs become instantly accessible to millions of autonomous agents. When an agent needs to extract data from the web, convert content to markdown, or crawl at scale, it can discover and use ScrapeGraphAI without any human intervention.
We're betting on the agent-first economy. This is where the puck is going.
The Composability Unlock
Today, building an agent that searches the web, scrapes pages, translates content, generates summaries, and sends reports means integrating 5+ services, managing 5+ API keys, and handling 5+ billing relationships.
With Orthogonal, that agent discovers and orchestrates all of them autonomously, paying only for what it uses. Agents become true service orchestrators.