Entrepreneur Sergey Solonin, widely known as the co-founder and longtime CEO of Qiwi, will lead Mercuryo AI Labs. He announced the move on LinkedIn, saying he will focus on developing infrastructure that enables AI agents to make payments to each other.
Solonin served as Qiwi’s CEO for nearly eight years before stepping down in January 2020. Since then, he has invested in multiple startups and launched an ambitious project in Bali called Nuanu, a creative city he began building in 2022. According to Solonin, around 5,000 people currently live there. Despite these projects, he has now decided to return to fintech.
Interestingly, Solonin didn’t start a new venture from scratch but instead joined Mercuryo, a cryptocurrency payments service. The company was founded in 2018 by Petr Kozyakov, Grigory Vaysman, and Alexander Vasiliev.
Public data shows two funding rounds for Mercuryo: €2.5 million in 2020 and $7.5 million in 2021, both led by venture fund Target Global. It is unclear whether Solonin participated as an investor in those rounds.
Solonin explains his renewed interest in fintech by pointing to the next evolution of payments:
“The next wave of payments won’t be between people. It will be between agents. Software will pay software. Autonomously. AI agents can already search, compare, negotiate and recommend. But the moment they actually need to pay for something, a human still has to step in. Every time. That’s the bottleneck — and it’s massive.”
He says Mercuryo AI Labs will focus on solving that bottleneck by building agentic payment infrastructure.
“So I’m going all in. Today I’m leading Mercuryo AI Labs — a company building infrastructure for agent payments. The idea is simple: give your AI agent a virtual card, set the spending rules, and let it transact. Settlements can happen in stablecoins or fiat. There’s a full audit trail. Humans set the policy — agents execute.”