Kite, a blockchain startup developing infrastructure to enable communication between AI agents, has raised $18 million in Series A funding. The round was co-led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst, with additional participation from 8VC, Samsung Next, and Alumni Ventures.
The new funding brings Kite’s total capital raised to $33 million, including a previously unannounced seed round. Cofounder and CEO Chi Zhang declined to share the company’s valuation or whether the deal included token warrants—rights to future tokens that have yet to be released.
In its announcement on X, Kite said the funding will accelerate its mission to build the foundational infrastructure for what it calls the “agentic internet.” The company aims to provide unified identity, governance, and native access to stablecoin payments, enabling AI agents to authenticate, transact, and coordinate securely without intermediaries.
Building the “agentic internet”
Formerly known as Zettablock, Kite is designing blockchain infrastructure for a future where AI assistants can collaborate and conduct transactions autonomously. According to Zhang, the key challenge is ensuring trust between agents—verifying, for instance, that one agent genuinely represents Amazon while another is tied to OpenAI.
“Today, if we want to shop, we go to Amazon or a Shopify store to browse and purchase,” Zhang told Fortune. “In the future, it will be automated—we won’t need to leave Perplexity, or ChatGPT.”
One practical use case is allowing a user to type a request into a chatbot—such as ordering a T-shirt from a Shopify store—and have the AI autonomously locate and buy the product.
Kite has already launched its Ozone testnet, which lets early users experiment with the platform, stake testnet tokens to earn XP, and engage with partner AI agents as integrations roll out.
