TLDR: Kite AI, a decentralized AI infrastructure provider, has successfully closed an $18 million Series A funding round led by PayPal Ventures, bringing its total funding to $33 million. The capital will be used to further develop its AI agent technology, including its AIR system and an AI-centric layer-1 blockchain, aiming to enable autonomous AI agents to transact and interact seamlessly within the Web3 ecosystem.
Kite AI, a pioneering decentralized AI infrastructure provider, announced today the successful completion of an $18 million Series A funding round. This latest investment, spearheaded by PayPal Ventures, elevates Kite AI’s total cumulative funding to an impressive $33 million. The substantial capital injection is earmarked to accelerate the development of its cutting-edge AI agent technology, which seeks to seamlessly integrate stablecoin payments with autonomous agents within the Web3 landscape.
The funding round saw participation from a diverse group of prominent investors, including 8VC, Samsung Next, SBI US Gateway Fund, Vertex Ventures, Hashed, HashKey Capital, Avalanche Foundation, LayerZero, and Animoca Brands, among others. This broad support underscores the industry’s growing recognition of Kite AI’s vision for an agentic internet.
Kite AI is at the forefront of building foundational infrastructure for what it terms the “agentic economy,” envisioning AI agents as a new and critical user category in the Web3 ecosystem. These AI agents are defined as autonomous software programs capable of perceiving their environment, making independent decisions, and executing actions to achieve specific goals without continuous human oversight.
A cornerstone of Kite AI’s innovation is its Agentic Internet Runtime (AIR) system, which was launched in February as part of its AI-centric layer-1 blockchain testnet. Built on Avalanche (AVAX), this blockchain is designed to enhance scalability and data processing capabilities while providing centralized coordination for complex AI workflows.
The AIR system empowers AI agents to authenticate and conduct transactions autonomously, featuring programmable identities, native stablecoin payments, and robust policy enforcement on its dedicated blockchain. The system comprises two key components: an Agent Passport, which offers identity services with operational guardrails, and an Agent App Store, providing agents with custom services, data sources, and commerce tools, enabling them to pay for these services.
According to a Kite representative, the Agent Passport “creates a multi-layered identity system where each participant—users, agents, and sessions—has distinct cryptographic identities that form a chain of trust.” This ensures that all actions can be cryptographically traced back to their origin, fostering transparency and accountability.
Alan Du, a partner at PayPal Ventures, emphasized the significance of Kite AI’s work, stating, “Kite is the first real infrastructure that is purpose-built for the agentic economy.” He further highlighted the critical role of payments in AI agent systems, noting that “Kite bridges this critical gap by providing stablecoin-based, millisecond-level settlement.”
Steve Everett, Head of Global Market Development for PayPal’s Crypto and Digital Assets department, echoed this sentiment, adding that such systems pave the way for “a truly global, automated economy where people, enterprise and machine can interact with ease and trust.” He also pointed out the benefits of “simultaneous, atomic settlement, governed by smart contracts that allow for real-time tracking and auditing across highly performant blockchain protocols.”
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Kite AI’s leadership team brings a wealth of expertise across the essential pillars of the agent economy: blockchain protocol engineering, large-scale data infrastructure, and applied AI. CEO Chi Zhang holds a PhD in AI from UC Berkeley and previously led core data products at Databricks. CTO Scott Shi was instrumental in building real-time AI infrastructure at Uber and was a founding engineer on Salesforce Einstein AI. The team collectively holds over 30 patents and has numerous publications at top conferences such as NeurIPS and ICML, with members hailing from institutions like Uber, Databricks, Salesforce, NEAR, UC Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Tokyo.
