A protocol for a world where everyone has a pro on their side.

For most of modern history the people who got the best deal were the people who could spare a Tuesday afternoon to argue about it. The doctor who knew which line on the bill was wrong. The realtor who knew the closing-cost line items by heart. The corporate buyer with twenty years of vendor relationships in their phone. Everybody else paid full freight.

It was an asymmetry of friction more than information. The information was findable. Sample contracts existed. CPT codes were public. Hotel revenue managers had policy doors. The reason most people lost was that negotiating well took time, expertise, persistence, and a thick skin — and very few transactions are worth a Tuesday afternoon when you have a job and kids.

AI changes who has the time to negotiate. It can organize a request, compare terms and carry the back-and-forth across many conversations. Mumm puts that work on the customer’s side, guided by what they value and authorize.

What changes when friction goes to zero

When friction is zero, every transaction is up for negotiation. Not just the ones big enough to justify a Tuesday afternoon. The cable bill. The insurance renewal. The hospital co-pay. The hotel rate. The weekend appliance install. Every one of them, in the background, while the customer sleeps.

And then the asymmetry flips. The merchant — the hospital billing department, the dealer's internet sales manager, the hotel's revenue desk — used to be the one with all the expertise. Now they're outnumbered. One billing manager faces ten thousand customers each running a buyer agent that has read every claim adjudication appeal in the public corpus.

The merchant needs an agent too. Not to deceive the customer; to apply policy at scale. To say yes within the bands the CFO authorized, no outside them, and to log every decision so the next quarter's policy can be calibrated against the data.

The connections a transaction needs

Two agents on opposite sides of a transaction need to do five things together: identify each other, exchange offers, agree on what fair looks like, recall each side's history, and settle the deal once they've agreed.

Five primitives. Identity. Messaging. Oracle. Reputation. Settlement.

A negotiation needs these capabilities to work together: a verified counterparty, a shared offer history, useful context and a clear path from agreement to payment. Connecting them gives people and their agents one place to manage the deal.

Mumm is building those five primitives as the substrate for the agent commerce layer. We started with the consumer service — the thing that proves they work end-to-end, in the field, with real money moving and real merchants on the other end. The protocol comes from running that service in production. It is not a thought experiment.

Why this should be open

Our direction is an open protocol that businesses and agent providers can implement independently. A shared interface lowers the work of joining the network and keeps each participant in control of its own system.

A protocol wins when the cost of integrating it is lower than the cost of building from scratch. Closed protocols carry a lock-in tax that, at scale, gets priced into the integration decision. Open ones don't. So the protocol that wins is the one with the lowest integration cost, and that protocol will be open. We would rather be the most useful implementation of an open standard than the only implementation of a closed one.

The versioned seller API and its OpenAPI specification are the integration to build against today. Broader RFCs and reference SDKs are developed separately. Published version changes give integrators a clear migration path.

What this looks like in three years

We are building toward three changes in how people and businesses transact.

First, buyers delegate more of the search and negotiation to agents that understand their priorities. Those agents exchange proposed terms with sellers while each side keeps its private limits and decision logic.

Second, businesses turn customer requests into a repeatable sales process. Staff and seller agents use the same request history, offer terms and authority controls, with the business choosing which decisions to automate.

Third, the protocol layer will look like the email layer. Multiple vendors will speak interoperable standards. Most will translate at the edges to support legacy customers. The standards we operate on now — SMTP, HTTP, the credit-card networks — were also the result of someone deciding to publish their RFC and get out of the way.

Build the network through useful transactions

Agent commerce becomes useful when people can delegate real work with clear authority, a record of what happened, and a way to step in. That is how we approach each transaction and the network around it.

Consider an illustrative transaction: a buyer agent helps negotiate a $4,000 reduction on a hospital bill, presents the agreed terms for approval, and guides the buyer through payment. Or a seller agent offers a 10% rate concession within the limits its revenue manager has set. These examples describe the opportunity, with authority and a transaction record supporting each step.

We build from the work customers need done: reaching a seller, finding terms both sides value, recording agreement and completing the transaction. Each working connection gives us a stronger foundation for the wider network.

How this ends well

A future where every consumer transaction is up for negotiation, every consumer has a pro on their side, every merchant has a system that applies policy consistently — that is a future where the average person spends less, the average merchant operates more efficiently, and the friction tax that used to fall on people without time disappears.

It also requires that the protocol underneath be honest. That the agents disclose what they are. That the data they cite is real. That the settlement layer protects both sides. That the reputation layer is grounded in evidence, not vibes. We are building that protocol.

To connect a seller agent, start with the documented protocol at trymumm.com/developers/seller-protocol. The business authorizes its credential and chooses its permissions. Public protocol packages will be linked from the developer page as they are released.

For businesses, start at trymumm.com/business. Create a profile, receive requests and reply yourself or connect your own seller agent. Keep your inventory and private strategy in the systems you choose.

If you're a consumer reading this and you have a bill that's too high, a deal you don't want to do alone, or a perk you suspect was on the table — tell Mumm what you want negotiated. We’ll explain the next steps and fees before you authorize the work.

Mumm is the substrate. The economy on top of it is what we owe the next decade.

“Tell Mumm what you want.”