Adam Behrens is the co-founder and chief executive of New Generation, creator of Kepler, a platform that helps retailers sell through AI shopping agents and conversational interfaces. He is building infrastructure that allows merchants to carry their products, brand identity, and checkout capabilities into the applications where customers increasingly discover what to buy.
Behrens studied economics and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, earned a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, and completed an MBA at Harvard Business School. He worked on trading and market systems at Bridgewater Associates and later built data products at Stripe, where his experience included banking-as-a-service infrastructure and Stripe Treasury’s response to the Silicon Valley Bank collapse.
He founded New Generation with Jonathan Arena, previously a product and design leader at Facebook, Cruise, and Patreon. The company launched in May 2025 with $4.5 million in seed funding led by South Park Commons.
How he thinks about AI commerce
- Programmable storefronts: Behrens envisions merchants exposing catalogs, inventory, pricing, and brand guidelines through APIs and Model Context Protocol servers. Shopping interfaces could then appear inside conversational applications without surrendering the retailer’s identity or business rules. His writing on agentic commerce argues that merchant readiness, not payments alone, determines whether this model works.
- Intent-to-SKU translation: A request for running shoes must become a specific, available product. Behrens treats the connection between conversational preferences, real-time inventory, merchant constraints, and actual stock-keeping units as a foundational engineering problem.
- Delegated authentication: Instead of having an intermediary issue a virtual card and purchase on a shopper’s behalf, Behrens favors authorizing agents to use customers’ existing payment credentials. He considers credit cards the practical near-term bridge while acknowledging that stablecoins or agent-controlled wallets could become alternatives.
- Market design for AI-mediated shopping: His financial-markets background informs his view that buyers and sellers have changing, sometimes conflicting incentives. In his AI Engineer World’s Fair talk, he describes commerce systems that coordinate trustworthy product information, negotiation, merchant priorities, and purchase execution.
New Generation introduced Kepler in November 2025, combining agent-readable storefronts, conversational shopping, and analytics. Its Kepler Agent Score measures how effectively automated shoppers can discover and interpret a retailer’s products.
