Agentic Commerce Is Coming — These 3 Micro-Caps Are Already Building the Plumbing

John Collison spent a Bloomberg podcast explaining how AI agents will soon buy things autonomously — domains, APIs, cloud resources — and Stripe is wiring up the 'commerce layer' for all of it. Cool story. But Stripe is private. So while the crowd chases NVDA and MSFT, let's talk about three publicly traded names that are actually in the blast radius of these macro themes — and that almost nobody is discussing.

$MP (MP Materials, ~$4B market cap) is America's only scaled rare earth miner, and a Bloomberg podcast this week flat-out said the US needs another decade to fix its $1.2 trillion rare earth crisis — with China controlling nearly the entire magnet supply chain. MP is the one domestic name with a functioning mine-to-magnet operation, making it a de facto national security play every time a DC policy briefing happens. The catalyst? Any executive order on critical minerals procurement or a DOD contract expansion could be the spark.

$IDN (Intellicheck, ~$80M market cap) is a digital identity verification company — tiny, obscure, and sitting directly in the crosshairs of the 'digital control grid' buildout that Andrei Jikh's viral video laid out this week, covering World ID, stablecoins, and the Genius Act. As programmable money gets regulated and KYC requirements explode, someone has to verify who's spending it. Intellicheck does exactly that for banks and retailers. Nobody's talking about it. Yet. And $PTSI (P.A.M. Transport Services, ~$300M market cap) is a boring trucking and logistics company that looks like a sleeper given Flix/Greyhound's surging ridership numbers — rising fuel costs are pushing freight modal shifts and ground transport demand in ways that benefit lean operators with owned fleets. Sometimes the most interesting trade is the one that sounds the most boring at a dinner party.