Christian Pickett still remembers the spreadsheet. Rows upon rows of API credentials, each with its own billing dashboard, usage limits, and renewal date. He'd built payment infrastructure at Coinbase and billing systems at Vercel—places where complexity is the cost of doing business. But watching developers build AI agents in 2024 and 2025, he kept seeing the same choreography: sign up, copy keys, paste into environment variables, set up monitoring, hope nothing breaks.
Meanwhile, across the industry at Google, Bera Sogut was managing API access for reCAPTCHA and Maps. Different products, same friction. Eventually, the two found themselves asking a question that seemed almost too simple: What if agents didn't need API keys at all?
On January 29, they emerged from Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch with Orthogonal, a two-person startup built around a deceptively straightforward premise. One master key. A marketplace of APIs behind it. Agents discover what they need, call it, pay per request. Done.
No subscriptions. No account sprawl. No 3 a.m. alerts because a key expired in production.
Building the Abstraction Layer
Orthogonal offers developers three ways in. The most elegant might be the MCP server hosted at mcp.orth.sh, compatible with Claude Desktop, Cursor, and other clients that speak Anthropic's Model Context Protocol. Plug it in and the agent gains four capabilities: search APIs by description, pull detailed endpoint specs, generate integration code, and execute requests—all without leaving the development environment.
Teams wanting tighter control can use the TypeScript SDK or REST API instead, both offering similar discovery-to-execution flows. Then there's the "Agent Skill," which is exactly what it sounds like: a markdown file published at orthogonal.com/skill.md that agents can fetch to learn authentication patterns. It's designed primarily for OpenClaw but works with Claude Code and Codex—essentially a how-to guide written for software that reads instructions.
Under the hood, the platform functions as a unified gateway. Orthogonal handles provider authentication, routes requests, manages rate limiting and retries, then returns both the actual API response and metadata about what it cost. Developers search using natural language—"find APIs for email enrichment"—and get back structured results with pricing attached. If it looks useful, they can call it immediately.
The abstraction is the product. Which raises the obvious question: what does that abstraction cost?
The Economics of Per-Request Everything
Orthogonal divides its catalog into three pricing bands. Basic runs $0.001 to $0.01 per request. Standard spans $0.01 to $0.10. Premium tops out between $0.10 and $1.00 per call. In practice, that means Olostep web scraping hovers around half a cent, Hunter email searches cost roughly a penny, and Apollo contact enrichment runs about three cents per lookup.
New accounts get $5 in credits—down from $10 at launch, a small but telling adjustment that suggests the founders are still calibrating how much free usage converts to paying customers. The default billing model is prepaid credits. Every response includes a detailed price object, letting agents track spend in real time without parsing invoices later.
For higher-volume scenarios, Orthogonal supports something more exotic: x402 direct payments using USDC on the Base blockchain. It's essentially HTTP 402—the "payment required" status code that's been sitting dormant in the spec since 1997—finally put to work. Agents pay providers directly via micropayment flows, bypassing Orthogonal's prepaid system entirely. Whether that becomes mainstream or remains a niche for crypto-native developers is still an open question.
The Partner Roster
Seventeen logos currently grace Orthogonal's homepage, a mix of web scraping tools (Olostep, ScrapeGraphAI, Riveter), search and data providers (Andi, Linkup, Coresignal), contact enrichment services (Fiber, Sixtyfour, Tomba), and specialized offerings like Precip for weather data and Didit for identity verification.
At least two partners felt the launch warranted their own announcements. Andi, an AI search engine with a 14-billion-page index, published a post explaining how it's exposing that index through Orthogonal using x402 micropayments. ScrapeGraphAI wrote about how the x402 protocol could reshape the economics of per-request API access—bold language for what amounts to a billing innovation, but perhaps justified given how much friction the model eliminates.
Throughout February, Orthogonal ran a partner spotlight series on its blog, profiling fifteen companies now available through the platform. It's the kind of content marketing that doubles as ecosystem signaling: look how many providers are betting this model works.
Curation as a Moat (Maybe)
Around a week ago—the exact date is less important than the timing—Orthogonal introduced "Orthogonal Skills," a curated marketplace of human-reviewed capabilities. Initially built for OpenClaw, it's free to use, verified by the Orthogonal team, with developers only paying when a skill actually calls a paid API.
The timing isn't accidental. In February, The Verge ran a piece detailing security nightmares emerging in OpenClaw's open skill hubs, where malicious extensions had begun proliferating. Orthogonal's answer leans into curation as a feature, perhaps even a competitive advantage. The broader skills ecosystem is moving fast—chaotically fast, depending on who you ask. The bet here is that developers building production agents will gravitate toward platforms that vet what their agents can access, even if it means sacrificing some of the wild-west flexibility that made agent ecosystems appealing in the first place.
Whether curation scales, or whether it just creates a bottleneck that open alternatives route around, is one of the more interesting questions facing the company.
The Infrastructure Layer Emerges
Orthogonal isn't working in a vacuum. Google and partners launched AP2 for mandate-based agent authorization. Anthropic's Model Context Protocol—which Orthogonal builds directly atop—has become something close to a standard for agent tool access. Mastercard introduced Agent Pay with its own MCP toolkit. PayMCP and xpay have emerged as alternative monetization layers for MCP servers.
Business Insider reported last September that more than sixty companies, including PayPal and American Express, are backing various flavors of what people are calling "agentic internet rails." The infrastructure stack is starting to converge: MCP for tool discovery, A2A for inter-agent messaging, AP2 for authorization, x402 for micropayments. Orthogonal positions itself at the discovery and metered settlement layer—translating those protocols into something an agent can use with, theoretically, a single line of code.
It's early. The protocols are still being hammered out. Standards emerge slowly, then all at once. But there's a case to be made that whoever owns the abstraction layer between agents and APIs might end up owning a meaningful piece of the infrastructure.
Pickett and Sogut have Demo Day scheduled for March 24. Until then, they're signing partners, shipping features, and making a case that's almost radical in its mundanity: managing API keys shouldn't be an agent's job. Maybe it shouldn't have been a developer's job either.
Whether the market agrees will depend less on the elegance of the technical solution—which seems sound—and more on whether agents proliferate fast enough to make the economics work. That's a bet on the future arriving faster than the skeptics expect.
For now, Orthogonal is building like it will.
