Decentralized AI infrastructure provider Kite AI has raised $18 million in Series A funding led by PayPal Ventures, bringing its total funding to $33 million.
Kite AI announced on Tuesday to Cointelegraph that other investors include 8VC, Samsung Next, SBI US Gateway Fund, Vertex Ventures, Hashed, HashKey Capital, Avalanche Foundation, LayerZero, and Animoca Brands. In February of this year, Kite launched an AI-driven Layer-1 blockchain testnet based on Avalanche (AVAX), aimed at enhancing scalability and data processing capabilities, and providing centralized coordination for AI workflows.
Kite aims to empower agent-based AI infrastructure through distributed infrastructure, viewing AI agents as a new category of users within the Web3 ecosystem. An AI agent is an autonomous software program capable of perceiving its environment, making decisions, and executing actions to achieve goals without continuous human intervention.
Kite has launched the AIR system, enabling AI agents to achieve independent authentication and transactions on a dedicated blockchain with programmable identities, native support for stablecoin payments, and policy execution. AIR consists of two main components: Agent Passport, which provides a secure operational mechanism for identity services, and Agent App Store, which offers customized services, data sources, and business tools for agents, allowing them to pay for these services.
A representative from Kite explained that the Passport "creates a multi-layer identity system, where each participant—user, agent, and session—has a unique cryptographic identity, forming a trust chain." This mechanism ensures that all operations can be cryptographically traced back to their source.
Kite co-founder and CEO Chi Zhang stated that the team believes autonomous agents will become "the dominant user interface of the future digital economy." He pointed out that such agents require structured and verifiable data, which is the first problem the team aims to solve. The current phase is focused on building identity, trust, and programmable payments specifically for AI agents.
Zhang mentioned that through publicly available application programming interfaces (APIs), PayPal or Shopify merchants "can opt into the Kite agent app store and be discovered by AI shopping agents." Purchases made within this ecosystem are settled on-chain and transparently, utilizing stablecoins. The team is working to achieve more integrations across commercial, financial, and data platforms.
In a conversation with Cointelegraph, a representative from Kite explained that "PayPal is a formal partner in the pilot phase, and Shopify is in the pilot phase of API integration."
PayPal Ventures partner Alan Du stated that Kite is "the first true infrastructure tailored for the agent economy." He added that payments are a technical challenge for AI agent systems, "Kite bridges this critical gap by providing millisecond-level settlements based on stablecoins."
Steve Everett, head of global market development for PayPal's crypto and digital assets division, stated that such a system allows for "a truly global automated economy where people, businesses, and machines can interact easily and trustfully."
The enthusiasm for AI agents capable of handling crypto transactions and Web3 interactions is steadily growing. Coinbase development team members Kevin Leffew and Lincoln Murr recently stated that these agents are set to become "the largest power users of Ethereum."
However, the way AI agents interact with other systems is fundamentally different from how humans interact, and their capabilities are vastly different from ordinary humans. Therefore, significant efforts are being invested in developing specialized infrastructure and middleware to enable AI agents to interact with complex systems, including Web3 infrastructure.
Adrian Brink, co-founder of Web3 AI agent infrastructure company Anoma, recently pointed out that such systems require intent-based blockchain infrastructure. In this context, intent refers to user-defined goals or expected outcomes expressed at a high level, with the blockchain and agent systems interpreting and executing by automatically determining the necessary actions and transactions.
Some AI agent-based systems have already seen large-scale adoption in Web3. Data from earlier this month indicates that Clanker, a decentralized application (DApp) built around AI agents that creates memecoins based on prompts, has generated over $34.4 million in fees for its users.
"Clanker is an AI that launches your crypto tokens," the DApp's website states. "Give it a name and symbol, and it will automatically handle deployment, market creation, and fee sharing."
Related: A Citigroup survey shows that by 2030, cryptocurrencies are expected to account for one-tenth of the global post-trade market.
Original article: “PayPal Ventures invests $18 million in Kite AI to power AI agents”
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