In 2022, James Clift launched Durable to help independent business owners launch and grow faster, without the need for technical or marketing expertise. Today, the company serves more than three million businesses globally, from conventional businesses like landscaping, personal training, and car detailing to unique niches like cryotherapy for racehorses and seasonal porch decorating.

In 2026, Durable launched a major update to the platform. The new, fully agentic platform helps business owners build a website, get discovered through AI assistants, respond to leads with the right context, and collect payments from customers.

“We help business owners focus on the work, while Durable runs the business,” said Osama Khan, CPTO at Durable. “Within the first few minutes, you’ll have a full marketing and finance back operation with multiple agents doing everything from SEO and GEO, to chasing your invoice payments.”

Building atop the foundation of a long-term partnership

Launching the new version of the platform was an ambitious undertaking for an engineering team with only six people: two engineers, two product managers, and two designers. Rather than building and maintaining a full suite of capabilities, the company decided to assemble a team of partners that offered the functionality it wanted to enable. For its “money agent,” which would enable payments, invoicing, and business accounts, it turned to Stripe.

Durable had first engaged Stripe as its payments partner years earlier after considering several vendors. “It came down to developer experience,” said Khan, adding that Stripe’s flexible APIs and extensive documentation minimize the burden of building and maintaining payment workflows for Durable’s small engineering team.

Durable launched with Stripe Payments and Stripe Connect, Stripe’s infrastructure for marketplaces and platforms. With the offering, Durable’s merchants around the world could accept online payments from more than 195 countries through more than 125 payment methods.

The AI-native approach to embedded finance

Durable kicked off its search for a partner to build out its business accounts product just as Stripe was launching Treasury for platforms. Treasury for platforms enables platforms and marketplaces to offer their merchants business accounts, money movement, and spend cards.

Beyond the product’s capabilities, Durable needed a partner whose architecture and approach to engineering aligned with its own. “We’re AI-native,” said Khan. “We could not have worked with a partner who doesn’t understand this. We appreciated that Stripe’s team was as AI-native as we are.”

Stripe’s credibility as an established financial infrastructure provider gave Durable another reason to choose the company. “Being able to say we’re launching business accounts powered by Stripe adds a lot more credibility than saying we’re launching with a lesser known institution,” said Khan. “It gives our customers confidence to know that Stripe has processed enough money to be a trustworthy long-term partner.”

The Durable team, which was building its agentic platform using Vercel’s eve framework, struggled with other vendors whose products had dated APIs that didn’t integrate smoothly with eve. “Stripe, on the other hand, made it very easy to build skills and connectors,” said Khan.

Further, Stripe’s AI-native mindset made cross-team collaboration smoother. Instead of sharing lengthy product requirement documents, Durable and Stripe could use AI vibe-coding tools to create live prototypes and whiteboard sketches that made it easier to iterate on a real-world solution. Stripe was also responsive to feedback, particularly around changes Durable requested to Stripe’s APIs that would let the team implement time- and event-based triggers (such as scheduling a payment in 30 days when an invoice is received), as well as guardrails around agent activity.

“We had to ensure that even if an agent is doing automated tasks, it’s checking with the human before touching your money,” said Khan. “Stripe’s atomic APIs let us put the right guardrails around agents.”

Three days, one FTE, one working product

Over the course of three days, an engineer, a product manager, and a designer—all working part-time, the equivalent of one full-time employee—used Treasury for platforms to build a working prototype of Durable’s embedded business accounts offering. Within two weeks, the team had integrated the prototype into its new platform, which launched publicly in October 2026.

Relying on partners saved Durable both time and money. “I know firsthand from my previous startup that building a compliance program costs you $1 million to $2 million a year if you want to do it right,” said Khan. “With Stripe, I have a fully compliant product without spending $2 million a year.”

As Durable continues to grow its AI business builder, the team is looking to Stripe to enhance its value proposition to merchants. Khan sees short-term opportunities to add features for businesses by adopting products such as Stripe Tax, as well as more ambitious prospects—like using stablecoins to eliminate card fees for businesses or helping international businesses hold money in US dollars.