I got here through a grant. Over the last few years, I've been a two-time grant recipient of the Interledger Foundation's $100M Grant for the Web Initiative and was later appointed a Grant Judge for the same initiative, evaluating institutional proposals for scalability and impact from the other side of the table. That period is where the question that became Aiyo first took shape.
Reading and writing enough proposals across Open Payments, I kept seeing investment and product effort flowing into better payment infrastructure — better rails, better wallets, better agent-to-agent transaction primitives. What I wasn't seeing clearly defined was the execution decision itself: the layer that decides, at the exact moment before an agent acts, whether this specific action, by this specific agent, under this merchant's specific policy and conditions, should actually be allowed to execute. Payment tells you the transaction happened. It does not, by itself, tell you whether that transaction should have been permitted to unlock a consequential action. That gap is the product surface Aiyo sits on. We call it the Runtime Decision Point.
I've spent twenty years working at the money layer where trust is enforced by humans holding the pen — negotiating partnerships, signing contracts, gating access. As a board director at the Sean Anderson Foundation, I helped raise seven figures for the Flint Water Crisis alongside foundations run by Jay-Z, Rihanna, and Kanye West, and personally cultivated and closed a major gift from the Segal Family Foundation. As CEO of MICOPEIA, I've closed brand partnerships with PepsiCo, Target, CVS, and Kroger and tripled year-over-year profits. Earlier, I built sponsor pipelines from scratch across Live Nation, AEG Live, Lollapalooza, Roc Nation, and Sennheiser.
What every one of those relationships taught me is that authorization has always been a human decision made at a specific moment: yes, this specific thing, by this specific counterparty, under these specific conditions, is sanctioned. Autonomous systems increasingly need that same discipline without requiring a human to hold the pen for every action. Someone has to build that layer, and I believe my experience working inside the trust economy gives me an unusually practical understanding of what authorization means when the money, reputation, and consequences are real.
Where to explore next on this site
If Aiyo is new to you, the pages below are the shortest path into the shape of what we're building and why. Every one exists to answer a specific question people have asked us during the last year of research and design.
How it Works
The Runtime Decision Point, in plain language. This is the primitive Aiyo is built around — the moment where a policy, a payment (or another kind of evidence signal), an actor identity, and a workflow context all converge into a single allow / deny / halt decision, at the exact instant before an action executes. Start here if you want to understand what Aiyo actually does.
Why Aiyo?
The meaning of the name, why we chose it, and how it maps onto the layers of the emerging agentic-economy stack. Aiyo is a small exclamation of joy that something important just happened — because when an authorization decision lands correctly, that IS something important that just happened. This page also explains why Aiyo is deliberately actor-agnostic, rail-agnostic, wallet-agnostic, and action-agnostic.
Halt Demo
Aiyo running live against its own API. Click "Start stream," watch a paid text stream flow, and see execution halt mid-word the instant the budget exhausts. This is enforcement you can observe with your own eyes in about thirty seconds. The most direct answer to "does it actually work?" I can offer without you writing any code.
Proof Playground
Paste any EVM transaction hash and watch Aiyo's on-chain settlement verifier check it against the chain. Same verifier that runs against production settlements — if a transaction passes here, it would pass Aiyo's authorization gate, and vice versa. This is the trust-model showpiece: no orchestration, no trust assumptions, just the chain.
Changelog
A merchant-visible record of every meaningful change Aiyo has shipped. Written for integrators who need to know what changed and why, not marketing copy. If you're technically inclined and want the honest picture of what's mature vs. what just landed vs. what's still cooking, this is the fastest read.
Status
Live operational status of every Aiyo component. Uptime, incident history, current known issues. This page exists because we hold ourselves to the same operational transparency we'd expect of any infrastructure we'd trust with real traffic.
What Aiyo is doing right now
Two things, in parallel. First, we are onboarding a small number of design partners — teams whose autonomous agents already take consequential actions and whose engineering and product leaders are actively wrestling with permissions, approvals, budgets, and runtime controls. Design partners help us pressure-test the architecture against real workloads and, in return, help shape the product before it hardens.
Second, we are integrating new adapters — new payment rails, new wallet providers, new evidence-signal sources, new execution surfaces — to continue our quadruple-agnostic position: actor-agnostic, rail-agnostic, wallet-agnostic, and action-agnostic. The Runtime Decision Point doesn't care whether the consequential action is a payment, a deploy, a procurement, or a compliance-sensitive write. It cares whether that action, under this policy, with this evidence, should be allowed to run.
Every integration Aiyo ships is a piece of evidence that the primitive holds. Every design partner we bring on is a piece of evidence that the primitive matters.
Interested in becoming a design partner?
Click the Early Access button at the top of any page and drop your email. Every message goes directly to me and I respond within one business day.
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