Jolly to Acquire Rye, an a16z-Backed Agentic Commerce Company

Jolly, the agentic incentives platform that turns everyday performance data into real incentives for frontline workers, today announced it will acquire Rye, the a16z-backed agentic commerce company that lets AI agents shop and check out anywhere online. The acquisition marks Jolly’s jump into agentic commerce — the fast-emerging category in which AI agents complete purchases on a person’s behalf. For the frontline workers Jolly serves, it means a faster, richer path from earning an incentive to receiving the product they want.

Jolly has served nearly 200,000 frontline workers across more than 100 employers and a dozen industries. Because an incentive is issued only when an employee completes an action that is profit-accretive to their employer, every dollar a customer spends on Jolly Points delivers a deterministic, measurable return. With Rye, both sides of Jolly’s funds flow — issuance and redemption — become agentic: an incentive is minted the moment an employer’s data hits a performance trigger, then spent via agentic checkout across the internet.

Rye has built one of the most capable agentic checkout networks in the market, enabling applications to complete purchases through direct merchant connections and agentic checkout across the internet. Through its agentic checkout capabilities, Rye can purchase millions of products across the internet. Rye was founded by a team that includes Arjun Bhargava (early engineer at Reddit) and Justin Kan (co-founder of Twitch).