Tempo Launches Mercator Tool Router for AI Agents
Mercator lets agents discover, pay for, and combine use outside tools, improving their performance on domain specific tasks along the way.
Tempo has launched Mercator, a tool router that lets AI agents find, pay for, and use outside services on demand instead of requiring developers to configure every tool in advance.
What’s the Scoop?
Tools on demand: With Mercator, an agent simply describes what it needs and its budget. Mercator then searches available services, ranks them by fit, reliability, and cost, and executes the selected workflow.
The agent multi-tool: The idea should be familiar. MPP already launched with a directory, while we’ve seen a series of similar “agent multi-tools,” including AgentCash and Pay.sh, that give agents one place to discover and pay for outside APIs without separate accounts or keys. Mercator pushes this model further: rather than just helping an agent find and access a tool, it can rank services and combine multiple paid tools into a single workflow.
One payment layer: Mercator connects agents to services using open payment standards MPP and x402, while users pay Mercator itself primarily with MACH, a USD-denominated Tempo credit purchasable through Apple Pay. It also supports USDC.e and pathUSD payment routes, handling payments to downstream services behind the scenes.
Making smaller models better: Tempo says Mercator improved model performance across all four benchmarks it tested, with the largest gains coming from cheaper models. GPT-5.6 Luna at high effort, for example, improved from 66.8% to 70.3% across the benchmark suite with Mercator, putting it within 2.3 points of GPT-5.6 Sol at medium effort without it.
