Daniel Wagner is an ecommerce veteran and serial entrepreneur. Decades before the internet was commercialized, at the age of 20, Daniel created the first online information service, M.A.I.D. He built the business into a global market leader before it was sold to Thomson Reuters.
In 1998, he founded Venda, an enterprise eCommerce innovator that developed a cloud commerce platform for major retailers like Lands’ End, Tesco, BooHoo, TJX Companies, Neiman Marcus, and many more. After becoming a European market leader, Venda was sold to Oracle in 2014. As CEO of Rezolve AI, Wagner is now pioneering “Agentic Commerce,” a vertical AI stack built for the retail industry. The platform leverages a proprietary LLM and strategic partnerships with Microsoft and Google to automate and enhance the entire commerce lifecycle, from discovery to settlement, for its enterprise clients.
Read more about Rezolve AI’s strategy to build the future of retail with Agentic Commerce in the interview below.
What made you acquire both SmartPay and Subsquid now, and why was M&A better than partnering?
We’re executing on Agentic Commerce at a global scale. To search, decide, transact, and settle in real time, you need payments and data as first-class, controllable rails. SmartPay brings proven stablecoin payments infrastructure with meaningful USDT volume, and Subsquid brings a decentralized data layer that’s fast, verifiable, and cost-efficient. Owning these capabilities lets us co-design with our brainpowa AI and the Brain Suite, align service-level agreements, and move at our own cadence. Partnerships don’t give you that level of determinism.
What is the most challenging part about integrating SmartPay and Subsquid, and how do you avoid disrupting existing users?
Integration should feel invisible to customers. That means maintaining API continuity while we expand capabilities, unifying authentication and compliance, ensuring robust observability, and executing zero-downtime cutovers. We run phased migrations with shadow traffic, preserve compatibility, and align KYC/AML, risk, and fraud controls. We have dedicated joint squads focused on integration quality, not just speed.
Walk us through a transaction on Rezolve, from search and personalization to checkout and settlement. Where do SmartPay and Subsquid plug in?
- Discover: A user sees brainpowa results using retailer content and context, which is enriched by Subsquid’s data layer.
- Decide: Agentic flows evaluate availability, pricing, promotions, and eligibility in real time.
- Transact: Brain Checkout handles the instant checkout, while SmartPay orchestrates the tender, stablecoin rails, multi-asset support, and inline risk assessment.
- Settle: SmartPay completes the settlement, and Subsquid provides verifiable event streams back into our analytics to improve the next decision.
How do SmartPay and your Tether partnership enable the merchant-fee-free payment model you’re promising?
With SmartPay controlling the payment path and our collaboration with Tether providing compliant, high-liquidity stablecoin rails, we can compress legacy costs, streamline cross-border flows, and automate settlement. On supported transactions, that lets us offer a merchant-fee-free option while meeting all speed, security, and compliance requirements.
Subsquid is described as your decentralized data layer for AI reasoning. How will its network enhance personalization across Rezolve’s retail ecosystem?
Three things matter: freshness, trust, and cost-performance. Subsquid enables high-throughput ingestion of relevant signals to keep decisions current. Its cryptographic provenance strengthens attribution and reconciliation. Finally, its decentralized indexing reduces unit costs so we can feed more context into brainpowa, driving better rankings and smarter agentic flows.
Rezolve’s ARR grew from $70 million to $90 million in one quarter. Which segments or partnerships contributed most to that surge?
Enterprise retail adoption is accelerating. Larger multi-banner deployments, customers moving from pilot to production, and the amplification from our go-to-market strategies with Microsoft and Google all contributed. We’re seeing the platform effect as usage scales.
Six research firms just raised their price targets after your results. What do they understand about Rezolve AI that the broader market might be missing?
They see that we’re not a generic AI story. We have a vertical LLM and agentic stack explicitly built for retail, significant distribution leverage with Microsoft and Google, and improving unit economics as data and payments move in-house. SmartPay and Subsquid turn former dependencies into core advantages.
Now that SmartPay and Subsquid are onboard, what will move faster inside Rezolve? Can you point to a deliverable that shortens because of these deals?
Merchant onboarding and payments go-live will shorten materially in supported markets. We can ship higher-impact personalization faster because we control the data substrate. Settlement cycles will compress, and we can roll out fee-free coverage and cross-border capabilities more quickly. You can expect visible progress over the next few quarters.
Rezolve is still pursuing M&A but is focused on capital efficiency. What’s your playbook for future acquisitions?
We acquire where it builds our rails (in distribution, data, or payments) or accelerates Agentic Commerce with a clear margin impact within 12 to 18 months. Targets must fit our brainpowa AI and the Brain Suite without heavy rewrites. We use disciplined structures, milestone-based consideration, and integration-led value creation to avoid unnecessary shareholder dilution.
If SmartPay solved payments and Subsquid solved data, what problem will Rezolve AI tackle next to complete the Agentic Commerce vision?
The next step is closing the loop from media to checkout to fulfillment and attribution. We’re focused on post-purchase optimization, real-time inventory and availability decisioning, and retail media monetization tied directly to measurable outcomes. Agentic Commerce is end-to-end, and that’s how we maximize ROI for retailers and scale value across the ecosystem.