PayPal acquires Israeli startup Cymbio for an estimated hundreds of millions, tightening its grip on AI-driven retail infrastructure
The Tel Aviv company helps brands surface products inside platforms like Copilot and Perplexity.
PayPal has agreed to acquire Cymbio, a Tel Aviv-based commerce technology company that helps brands distribute their product catalogs across a growing array of AI-driven shopping interfaces.
Deal terms were not disclosed, but it is estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2026, subject to customary conditions.
Cymbio has raised over $35 million to date, including from PayPal Ventures and Vertex Ventures.
The acquisition, announced on Thursday, reflects PayPal’s effort to position itself not only as a payments provider, but as a core infrastructure player in what it describes as “agentic commerce,” a model in which consumers increasingly discover and purchase products through AI systems rather than traditional e-commerce sites.
Founded in 2015 by Roy Avidor, Mor Lavi and Gilad Zirkel, Cymbio develops software that allows merchants to synchronize product data, inventory, and orders across multiple channels, including AI platforms such as Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity. Those same platforms are already supported by PayPal’s agentic commerce services, with integrations into OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini app expected to follow.
PayPal and Cymbio were already partners before the acquisition, and PayPal Ventures invested in the company in 2022. Bringing Cymbio in-house gives PayPal control over a layer of technology that sits upstream from payments, at the point where products are discovered, surfaced, and ordered by AI systems acting on behalf of consumers.
At the center of the deal is a PayPal service called Store Sync, which Cymbio’s technology also supported previously. Store Sync enables merchants to make their product catalogs visible within AI-powered shopping environments, while routing orders back into merchants’ existing fulfillment and management systems. Under the model, merchants remain the merchant of record and retain control over their customer relationships and branding, a point PayPal has emphasized as large platforms expand their influence over digital commerce.
Several large retailers, including Abercrombie & Fitch, Fabletics, Ashley Furniture, Newegg, and Adorama, are already live with Store Sync on Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity, according to PayPal.
