PayNearMe, a Santa Clara, California payments company, said on September 9, 2026 that it had acquired the technology assets of Marr Labs, a San Francisco start-up that builds AI agents, and hired the start-up's key employees.
Marr Labs was founded in 2023 and is backed by Y Combinator. Its software automates voice calls, messaging and back-office workflows for companies in regulated industries, with financial services as its main market. PayNearMe said the technology supported millions of customer interactions each month for financial services clients.
Terms were not disclosed. PayNearMe did not say how many people were joining, describing them only as the start-up's key employees. Marr Labs' agents will be built into PayXM, PayNearMe's platform for managing consumer payments.
What Marr Labs built
Marr Labs develops what it calls agentic systems: software agents that can hold voice conversations, answer messages and carry out multi-step tasks without a human operator. According to Finovate, its products covered compliant voice automation, document intelligence, workflow orchestration and real-time enforcement of compliance rules.
The focus on regulated businesses shaped the product. In lending, collections and other financial services, every call and message must follow disclosure rules and internal policies, and the company built its agents to work within those limits rather than as general-purpose chatbots.
“The Marr Labs team has proven its ability to build and deploy sophisticated AI systems at massive scale.”
The founders and their track record
Marr Labs was started by Dave Grannan, its chief executive, Han Shu, its chief technology officer, and Ghinwa Choueiter. The three had worked together at Vlingo, a speech-recognition company whose technology powered the first Siri app and Samsung's S Voice assistant, according to the PayNearMe announcement.
The start-up went through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, according to a review of that cohort, and the startup database Seedtable lists its last funding as a seed round in January 2024. No round sizes or other investors have been reported.
Why PayNearMe is buying
PayNearMe was founded in 2009 and is run by its founder and chief executive, Danny Shader. It describes its business as payment experience management, covering the whole cycle from sending a payment request to reconciling the money received. The company says it processes more than $50 billion in payments a year for more than 20,000 businesses.
Its PayXM platform accepts PayPal, Venmo, Cash App Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, cards, ACH bank transfers and cash at more than 62,000 US retail locations. Customers include consumer lenders, credit unions, toll road operators, iGaming companies and property managers.
PayNearMe said agents with access to a business's rules and workflows could handle more of each step in that process, from reminding customers that a bill is due to resolving questions after a payment fails. Rather than build that capability from scratch, it chose to buy a team that had already run such agents at scale for financial companies.
Shader said the Marr Labs team had shown it could build and deploy complex AI systems at very large scale, and that AI offered significant room to improve the experience PayXM delivers.
What changes for customers
PayNearMe did not give a timetable for releasing Marr Labs' agents inside PayXM or say whether Marr Labs would continue to serve its own clients under its name. Because the deal covered technology assets and staff rather than the whole company, existing Marr Labs contracts were not addressed in the announcement.
PayNearMe, which was named one of CNBC's World's Top Fintech Companies for 2026, framed the purchase as the start of a broader use of agentic AI across its platform, from payment requests through to reconciliation. Grannan said the founders had spent years building AI that works reliably at scale and pointed to the trusted platform PayNearMe had built for thousands of businesses. Shu made the case that agents alone are not enough: to be useful in payments, he said, they must run reliably and stay within compliance requirements, which is where PayNearMe's existing rules, workflows and payment rails come in.
