Mithril – Credit lines for AI agents so they can spend before they earn

Hey HN — I'm building Mithril. We give AI agents a credit line so they can pay for things autonomously.

The problem we kept hitting: if you're building an agentic business — say, an agent that manages ad spend, does research, scrapes the web — the agent has to spend money before it ever gets paid. It buys API calls, compute, services today and the revenue comes in weeks later. That cash flow gap is real.

Right now the options are: manage a dozen prepaid API keys across services (and pray none hit zero at 2am), or build custom payment logic per vendor. We think agents should just have a credit line. Sign up, get an API key, and your agent can spend USDC on-chain. You settle monthly like a corporate card. The part I think is technically interesting: you can't underwrite an AI agent the way you underwrite a person. There's no credit score. We're building underwriting that looks at model-level reasoning and agent behavior — it's a new problem and we're figuring it out in the open.

We have Python and TypeScript SDKs, a pre-integrated service catalog (search, scraping, LLMs, email, cloud browsers — $0.01/request), and a SKILL.md you can drop into Claude Code or any MCP agent to start transacting immediately.

We're super early. I'd genuinely love feedback on the concept, the developer experience, what's broken. If you sign up and try it, I will personally reach out and set up a call with you. Interested in hearing what agent payment patterns you've tried and what sucked.