Rezolve Frames Hostile Commerce.com Bid Around Stagnant Growth and Merchant Scale
Rezolve AI chief executive Dan Wagner used a Bloomberg Technology interview to defend his hostile bid for Commerce.com as an effort to accelerate Rezolve’s push for leadership in commerce and retail AI. Wagner argued that Commerce.com’s 60,000 merchants are an underused asset held back by weak growth and limited innovation, while Rezolve’s own revenue momentum and anti-hallucination technology could make that customer base more valuable under its control.
Rezolve says Commerce.com would speed a market land grab
Daniel Wagner framed Rezolve AI’s hostile bid for Commerce.com as part of a “land grab” in commerce and retail AI: the company is growing quickly, he argued, and needs to consolidate its position while the market is still being defined.
His case began with Rezolve’s own numbers. Wagner said the company went “from nothing” to $232 million of contracted annual revenue in one year, and reported $60 million of first-quarter revenue compared with $46 million for all of last year. He described that as “extraordinary momentum” in a market where, in his view, having the best product is not enough; the company also has to move quickly to establish leadership.
Commerce.com, by contrast, was described by Wagner as “a business that’s really kind of stuck” and one Rezolve could “unlock.” The strategic value is not that Rezolve lacks a growth path without Commerce.com. Wagner repeatedly said it does not. The value, as he framed it, is that an acquisition would give Rezolve a larger installed footprint immediately and allow it to accelerate adoption across customers Commerce.com already serves.
Rezolve’s market backdrop shown on Bloomberg was mixed but active: the shares were shown at 2.56, up 6.67% intraday and up 7.35% over one month, while roughly flat year to date at up 0.58%. That context sat alongside Wagner’s argument that the company is still early in a race for position.
Commerce.com’s 60,000 merchants are the contested asset
Ed Ludlow identified the strategic question behind the bid: whether Commerce.com’s 60,000 merchants are valuable enough for Rezolve to pay a higher premium. The on-screen ticker said Rezolve had made a “1-for-2 offer for Commerce.com shares,” and a later ticker said “Rezolve AI lowers its bid for Commerce.com.”
Wagner agreed that the merchant base is the asset, but characterized it as underused and dissatisfied. Commerce.com has “a 60,000 merchant base that’s frustrated with them,” he said, because of “lack of innovation.” He contrasted Commerce.com’s forecast growth with Rezolve’s own, calling the target’s expected growth “embarrassing.”
They’re forecasting growth of one and a half percent in the next 12 months. I mean, I, you can’t even imagine such a sort of embarrassing growth rate for a business in commerce.
Rezolve, Wagner said, is growing 750% year on year. On his telling, Commerce.com has built a large footprint over roughly a decade of providing services, but has “kind of lost” direction. Rezolve’s proposed role would be to “inject value,” “enthusiasm,” and “innovation” into that customer base, then grow that part of the business faster than Commerce.com is currently doing.
| Metric | Figure | Wagner’s use of it |
|---|---|---|
| Rezolve contracted annual revenue | $232M | Evidence of rapid growth from a standing start |
| Rezolve first-quarter revenue | $60M | Compared with $46M for all of last year |
| Commerce.com merchant base | 60,000 merchants | The strategic asset Rezolve says it could unlock |
| Commerce.com forecast growth | 1.5% over the next 12 months | Cited as evidence of stagnation |
| Rezolve claimed growth | 750% year on year | Used to argue Rezolve does not need the deal but could accelerate the target |
That is the center of Wagner’s bid logic: Commerce.com’s customer base is worth more if Rezolve can apply its technology and operating momentum to it, while Rezolve itself does not need the deal. Commerce.com’s year-to-date share move, shown down 30.10% at 2.88, sharpened the tension between his claim that the board should negotiate for shareholder value and the board’s resistance to the approach.
Wagner left open the possibility of paying more. Asked whether Rezolve could be more generous with a deal, he answered yes. But he paired that with frustration at Commerce.com’s board. According to Wagner, the board rejected Rezolve and then adopted a poison pill. He described the board as “so locked in its own protection” that it could not see the benefit of combining with Rezolve, and said a sensible board should be in “a proper conversation” to extract the best value for shareholders.
Stablecoins still need retail infrastructure
Caroline Hyde put Rezolve’s agentic commerce pitch next to the stablecoin thesis associated with Circle’s Jeremy Allaire: if stablecoins are part of the future of commerce, the question for Rezolve is whether it supplies the retail infrastructure rather than the token itself.
Wagner drew that distinction directly. Circle, he said, is “a coin” or “a token,” but a token needs infrastructure before it can be used in everyday commerce. His example was Starbucks: a consumer walking into a store today is not, in his view, going to use stablecoins to buy coffee.
RezolvePay is meant to bridge that gap. Wagner said Rezolve wants to let retailers and brands accept stablecoins with the same efficiency and consumer experience as credit cards and other forms of payment. He described the current crypto experience as “frustrating and clunky,” and said RezolvePay is intended to make it “as good if not better” than the payment experiences consumers already know.
For the Commerce.com bid, the payment point matters because Wagner is not describing the target’s merchants simply as distribution for a software product. His argument is that Rezolve’s agentic commerce and payment infrastructure would give it more ways to create value from Commerce.com’s existing merchant base than Commerce.com is currently achieving.
Rezolve’s claimed moat is preventing retail AI from hallucinating
Ed Ludlow stated the competitive risk plainly: if controlling the agent layer is the prize in commerce, Amazon, Alphabet, Google, or OpenAI might try to do the same thing and pursue the same market.
Wagner’s answer was categorical: “They can’t.” He said some have tried, citing an OpenAI deal with Walmart that he described as highly publicized about five to five and a half months earlier and said was disbanded two or three weeks before the interview. Wagner attributed that breakdown to “terrible mistakes,” which he described as hallucinations.
He explained the problem in terms of generative AI’s probabilistic nature. Such systems, he said, use mathematical algorithms that guess the next word and the next word to create a paragraph or answer. If a system is guessing, he argued, there is an element of error. In retail, that error is not cosmetic: it can mean customers buy the wrong products, are misled, return items, or are even insulted by the automated representative.
Wagner tied Rezolve’s claimed advantage to his background in search and to work he said the company has done over a decade. Rezolve, he said, recognized early that hallucinations would be a core obstacle and spent the last 10 years preventing them. The purpose was to build technology that could represent digital platforms as “the best salesman on the planet” when interacting with customers.
You can’t have the best salesman on the planet who’s hallucinating.
Wagner said Rezolve believes, and that Microsoft and Google have endorsed the belief, that Rezolve has the only technology in this vertical reliable enough for merchants. The standard he described is not merely producing fluent answers, but letting merchants deploy generative AI without worrying that the representative will sell the wrong things, make mistakes, mislead customers, or insult people.