Rain, a stablecoin payments company based in New York, has launched a product that lets AI agents hold and spend money under rules set by their owners. The product, called Rain Agent Vaults, was announced on November 10, 2026.
Each vault holds a balance that a business or consumer funds ahead of time. The agent can only spend, receive or send what is already in the vault.
Rain says the main gap it wants to close is payment. AI agents can already search for and compare products, but paying for them has been harder for the companies that build these tools.
Limits Built Into Every Purchase
When an agent needs to buy something, Rain issues a scoped card for that single job. The card is a virtual Visa or Mastercard card with its amount, merchant and expiry fixed when it is created.
Rain checks those details when the payment is authorized. A single-use card stops working after one approved purchase, and the agent cannot raise its own limit.
Rain gave an example of how this works in practice. A bakery owner moves $5,000 into a vault and tells the agent it may only pay suppliers and must ask her before spending more than $1,500.
Over a weekend, the agent buys 20 bags of flour for $640 and later 25 more bags for $800. Both purchases go through because they fit the rules.
When the agent finds a mixer for $2,400, the purchase is held for the owner’s approval. Equipment falls outside the rules, even though the vault has enough money.
Funding, Payouts and Branding
Users can fund a vault through bank transfers such as ACH, Fedwire, FedNow, SEPA and FPS, or with cards or stablecoins. Money must be in the vault before any card is issued against it.
Users do not need to buy stablecoins themselves. Funds are held as stablecoins in a non-custodial wallet, and Rain settles with card networks in stablecoins behind the scenes.
Rain says its scoped cards are accepted at 175 million merchant locations in 200 countries and territories. Agents can also send money to local bank accounts in more than 80 countries.
The product is designed so the company that built the agent keeps the customer relationship. The vault lives inside the partner’s app and the partner’s name appears on statements, while Rain stays in the background.
Rain contrasted this with third-party wallets, which place another company’s login and name inside an agent. It also said raw card numbers give a standing permission with no limit on how they are used.
“An agent that can search for a new pair of shoes but cannot pay for them is not doing its job,” said Farooq Malik, CEO and co-founder of Rain. He said developers can now build payments directly into their agents through a single integration.
Rain is a Visa and Mastercard Principal Member and a founding member of the Agentic Payments Alliance. The vaults build on Rain’s existing Agent Control Layer and scoped card products.
Rain is enabling its programs for Visa Intelligent Commerce and Mastercard Agent Pay. Cards issued from a vault will carry the networks’ agent credential, which signals the user’s consent to merchants and issuers.
The company says it is working with agent developers, marketplaces and payment platforms on the rollout. Rain says more than 100 organizations worldwide use its platform.
