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Kite, the company building foundational infrastructure for agentic payments, today announced an investment from Coinbase Ventures. This raise is an extension of Kite’s recent $33 million Series A fundraise led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst. Together, these investments reflect growing confidence in the autonomous agent economy and Kite’s role in building infrastructure powering agent-to-agent payments and AI-driven commerce.
The fund used from this investment will help address a critical bottleneck in the AI revolution. While AI agents can now manage complex tasks — from booking trips to executing trades — they remain dependent on human-approved operation loops. Kite’s infrastructure provides the missing layer for true autonomy: a blockchain-native network that delivers secure digital identity, programmable spending limits, and instant, low-cost settlements with native access to stablecoins, as essential for AI-to-AI commerce.
To scale this agent-to-agent blockchain network, Kite is now natively integrated with Coinbase’s x402 Agent Payment Standard, positioning itself as a primary execution and settlement layer for the protocol. As one of the first L1s to fully implement x402-compatible payment primitives, Kite allows AI agents to seamlessly send, receive, and reconcile payments through standardized intent mandates. This deep, chain-level integration is designed to accelerate the adoption of the x402 standard and unlock the full potential of the agentic economy.
Coinbase Ventures’ investment will support Kite’s continued product and infrastructure development across three converging market shifts shaping the autonomous economy:
The Need for a Programmable Trust Layer: As AI agents act independently, they require verifiable identity and enforceable rules. Kite’s Agent Passport provides this foundation, giving each agent a unique cryptographic identity and programmable governance controls. This ensures every autonomous transaction is secure, compliant, and verifiable on-chain.
Scalable Blockchain with the x402 Protocol as the Native Payment Rail for AI: The high-volume, microtransaction nature of agent commerce demands instant, low-cost settlements that traditional finance cannot support. Kite’s infrastructure is purpose-built for this reality, fully integrated with Coinbase’s x402 agent payment standard, and leveraging stablecoins and a high-throughput blockchain to enable sub-second finality and minimal fees — unlocking economic models only possible at this scale.
The Rise of Agentic Commerce as a Growth Engine: With trillions of AI agents projected to emerge, they represent the next frontier of digital consumers. Kite is integrating with major platforms like PayPal and Shopify, embedding its infrastructure to make these services discoverable and payable by autonomous agents. This positions Kite to capture the value of the next seismic shift in e-commerce.
“Today’s financial infrastructure breaks when AI tries to use it,” said Chi Zhang, CEO and Co-Founder of Kite. “Our mission is to build the economic backbone for the trillions of autonomous agents coming online. This vote of confidence from Coinbase Ventures, alongside our existing investors, validates that the future of AI is not just intelligent — it’s agentic, and it requires an AI native system to thrive. We are putting that infrastructure in place today.”
Kite is building the first blockchain for agentic payments, a foundational infrastructure where autonomous AI agents can operate with verifiable identity and programmable governance, with native access to stablecoin payments. Founded by AI and data infrastructure veterans from Databricks, Uber, and UC Berkeley, Kite has raised $33 million from top-tier investors, including PayPal, General Catalyst, Coinbase Ventures, and leading blockchain foundations.
For more information, please visit the official Kite website or follow Kite on X
Coinbase Ventures backs exceptional entrepreneurs working to advance the crypto ecosystem and support Coinbase’s mission of creating more economic freedom for the world. We partner with founding teams at the earliest stages, and invest broadly across all categories within the onchain economy. We have invested in hundreds of teams building everything from layer 1 protocols, Web3 infrastructure, centralized on-ramps, decentralized finance, NFTs, metaverse technologies, developer tooling, and more. We strive to be strategic partners for founders and take a collaborative approach to investing.
