While the World Talks About Agentic Commerce, Our Portfolio Company Norce Is Building It
Agentic commerce is one of the most talked-about themes in digital commerce right now. The idea is straightforward: AI agents that can browse, compare, negotiate, and buy on behalf of humans. McKinsey projects that agentic commerce could drive up to $5 trillion in global retail revenue by 2030. Microsoft, SAP, and Shopify are all racing to position themselves at the center of it. Conference stages are packed with panels debating what it will look like, when it will arrive, and who will win.
Our portfolio company Norce is taking a different approach. Instead of talking about it, they are building the infrastructure that makes it work.
What Norce has shipped
Norce Commerce is a Nordic SaaS platform purpose-built for B2B and large reseller companies with wide product assortments and complex pricing logic. The platform is API-first and fully composable, hosted on Microsoft Azure, and serves around 280 customers processing over SEK 20 billion in annual gross merchandise value.
In December 2025, Norce released what they call the Norce Agent Gateway: a set of tools that give AI agents structured, secure access to core commerce functions like product data, pricing, variants, and baskets. Further in January this year, Norce released an assistant MCP (Model Context Protocol) and an open-source Commerce Agent SDK.
For those less familiar with the technical details: MCP is an emerging standard that allows AI agents to interact with software systems in a controlled way. Think of it as giving an AI agent a set of keys to specific rooms in a building, rather than handing over the master key. The agent can look up products, check prices, and work with shopping baskets, but it does so within the rules and guardrails that the commerce platform enforces.
The open-source SDK goes a step further, providing reusable building blocks for teams that want to create agent-based commerce experiences on their own storefronts and workflows.
This matters because the bottleneck for agentic commerce is not the AI models themselves. It is the commerce infrastructure underneath. AI agents need structured, reliable, and governed access to product catalogs, pricing rules, inventory, and checkout flows. Without that, agentic commerce remains a demo on a conference stage. With it, you can start building real applications.
Microsoft took notice
Norce's work has caught the attention of Microsoft, who are now co-hosting a digital event with Norce to showcase what agentic B2B commerce looks like in practice.
The event, Next Era of Digital Commerce: How Agentic B2B Commerce Drives Real Business Impact, takes place on March 18 and will cover the evolution of the B2B buying journey from phone and fax to self-service portals, and now to the emerging phase of AI-assisted purchasing. It will focus on what this next shift looks like in practice and how the right technology and data foundations turn AI from hype into real business impact.
For a 52-person Nordic SaaS company to have Microsoft approach them to jointly present on a topic this central to their platform strategy says something about the quality of what Norce is building.
Register for the event here: Next Era of Digital Commerce (March 18, 2:30 PM CET)
Read more about Norce's agentic commerce releases: Winter of AI - Norce Product Update