The control plane for agentic payments.
Zaleus gives AI agents verifiable authority to transact — turning your spending policy into permissions, and every decision into signed, audit-ready evidence. Allow, step up, or block in real time, without ever touching the money.
Payments were built for humans clicking “approve”. AI agents break that assumption.
When a person pays, your systems lean on familiar signals — identity, login, an explicit human approval. When an AI agent acts on behalf of a team, those signals disappear and new questions appear at the exact moment money is about to move.
- ?Who authorised this agent, and does its authority trace back to a real person or system of record?
- ?What, precisely, is it allowed to buy or pay for — and for whom?
- ?Which budgets, limits and approved vendors apply to this specific transaction?
- ?Is this payment within company policy, or should a human be pulled in?
- ?Who is accountable if it turns out to be wrong, out-of-policy or disputed?
- ?Where is the evidence your auditors, finance and risk teams will ask for?
Zaleus answers these questions before an agent commits a single payment — and keeps the proof afterwards.
Authority before action, in four moves
Zaleus sits between your AI agents and the systems that hold budget, vendors and money — turning every agent payment into a controlled, evidenced decision.
Verify
Confirm the agent’s identity and follow its delegation chain back to a trusted human or system of record.
Authorise
Compile spending policy — budgets, cost centres, approved vendors and limits — into verifiable economic permissions.
Decide
Adjudicate every payment in real time against policy: allow, step up to a human, or block.
Prove
Seal each decision into a signed evidence packet an auditor can verify offline — no trust in us required.
Corporate travel under an AI mandate
A company authorises an AI travel agent to book flights under €600, only with approved carriers, only for registered employees, and only within the travel policy.
Before anything is booked, Zaleus checks the agent, its mandate, the merchant, the amount and the policy — then allows, escalates for human approval, or blocks, and seals the evidence either way.
An illustrative product flow showing the control logic — not a live transaction.
A software-only control plane for agent spend
Zaleus never moves or holds funds. It decides whether an agent’s payment should be trusted — and proves it — across every agent, rail and ERP you run.
Agent identity & authority
Verify agent identity and the full delegation chain to a trusted principal — OIDC/OAuth 2.1, Microsoft Entra Agent ID and Okta included.
Policy & mandate engine
Author, version and simulate spending policy, and issue verifiable mandates. Deterministic decisions with Cedar — ML advises, policy decides.
Decision orchestrator
Real-time allow / step-up / block at the moment of payment, on a sub-150 ms path, with human approvals via passkeys, Slack or Teams.
Evidence & audit
Every decision sealed into a canonical, cryptographically signed packet — verifiable offline and mapped to the obligations you already report against.
Connectors
Pull budgets, vendor master, POs and invoices from SAP, NetSuite, Ramp and Coupa; consume agent traffic over MCP, A2A and AP2.
Neutral & cross-stack
One decision-and-evidence layer that spans any agent harness, any rail and any ERP — consuming open standards instead of competing with them.
Built for the teams accountable for company money
Zaleus is designed for enterprises putting AI agents to work on the buy-side — where budgets, cost centres, approved vendors and audit already exist.
Agents are learning to pay. Governance is the gap.
AI agents are moving from answering to acting — and corporate money is already flowing to and through them. What’s missing is a neutral layer that decides whether an agent should pay, and proves it.
From recommendation to execution
Agent tools are shifting from reading data to taking actions — and the most consequential action is paying.
Fragmented, walled-garden controls
Card networks and spend suites are shipping agent controls — but each is bound to its own stack. No neutral, cross-stack control plane exists.
Regulation is catching up
Frameworks like the EU AI Act, DORA, PSD3 and eIDAS2 are turning agent oversight and evidence from good practice into an obligation.
Standards-native, format-agnostic
Zaleus consumes the open standards the ecosystem is converging on — and issues verifiable credentials — so you never have to bet on a single format or vendor.
Compliance-grade evidence, by design
Software-only orchestration. Zaleus never custodies funds, issues e-money, acquires merchants or settles transactions — it provides the authority, decision and evidence layer around payments executed by licensed providers. Built to the strictest European frameworks, and ready wherever you operate.
Every decision produces the evidence your finance, risk and compliance teams already need to keep — mapped to the obligations you report against anyway.
Put authority before action.
We’re building Zaleus with a small group of design partners. If your teams are putting AI agents near company money, let’s shape it together.
Build Zaleus with us
We’re developing Zaleus with a small group of design partners on real buy-side workflows. Tell us how your teams are putting AI agents to work — we’ll take it from there.
- Become a design partner — shape Zaleus around your procurement, finance and IT workflows.
- Pilot access — for teams already running agents that touch company money.
- Partnerships — for PSPs, marketplaces and spend platforms.