Cambrian raises $5.9M seed round from a16z CSX to power AI agents with verifiable financial data

Cambrian, a startup building AI infrastructure for finance, just raised $5.9 million in seed funding powerhouse a16z Crypto Startup Accelerator (CSX) leading the charge.

With AI agents becoming more independent—handling tasks, making decisions, and running workflows—these agents need something beyond just smart algorithms. In finance especially, these agents can’t afford to guess. They need access to clean, reliable, real-time, and verifiable data to make the right decisions.

That’s where Cambrian comes in.

The startup is building the infrastructure layer for financial agents, combining blockchain and offchain data into context-rich, machine-readable intelligence. Today’s funding will support the company’s testnet and mainnet launches and help expand its network of data validators.

CSX’s fourth cohort (CSX 04) kicks off in San Francisco this week, where Cambrian will work closely with the a16z team to refine its decentralized network. The company also attracted investment from Blockchain Builders and several prominent angels from The Graph ecosystem — a nod to the startup’s deep technical roots and growing credibility in the AI infrastructure space.

At the helm is Sam Green, a name that’s quickly becoming one to watch in AI and crypto circles. Green previously co-founded Semiotic Labs, a core developer team for The Graph, which received a $60 million grant from The Graph Foundation. He also played a key role in building Odos, a DeFi aggregator that has facilitated over $80 billion in trading volume for 3 million users. Green holds a PhD in reinforcement learning and previously worked as a researcher in AI and cryptography at a U.S. Department of Energy lab. His blend of academic depth and practical execution is rare — and it shows in the way Cambrian is being built.

“We’re thrilled to join the CSX accelerator,” Green said. “I’ve followed the work of a16z’s Chris Dixon, Tim Roughgarden, and Justin Thaler for years. Working with them and the rest of a16z’s world-class staff will be valuable as we finish the design of Cambrian’s decentralized network. We will use our seed funding to accelerate development and increase our data coverage and performance. Crypto is quickly moving into the future with autonomous financial agents, and we intend to be the best source of financial intelligence for their high-consequence tasks.”

Cambrian’s infrastructure enables agents to consume both onchain and offchain data — including social sentiment — in a way that’s structured, fast, and verifiable. For developers building AI agents that require trust in the signals they receive, Cambrian’s consensus-driven design allows them to filter and select data based on verifiability. The system taps into The Graph’s Firehose for high-speed access to raw blockchain data.

The company is already testing its capabilities through Deep42, an AI agent that publishes daily DeFi insights on via @DeepFortyTwo. It’s an early look at the kinds of products that can be built using Cambrian’s infrastructure — and a proof point for what agentic AI can achieve when it has access to smarter data.

Cambrian is working with a growing list of partners focused on building agentic systems, including EigenLayer, Virtuals, and Eliza Labs.

“We’re seeing growing interest in verifiable financial agents,” said Nader Dabit, Director of Developer Relations at Eigen Labs. “EigenLayer provides the best verifiable runtime for these agents, but they also need data with strong performance and security guarantees. So I’m excited that Cambrian will be launched on EigenLayer. I expect Cambrian to serve a key role as a verifiable sensory layer for the coming wave of agentic finance.”

While Cambrian’s first use case centers on DeFi, the company is thinking bigger. Its long-term vision is one where intelligent agents work alongside humans — not just to automate tasks, but to make meaningful, data-informed decisions that shape how capital flows and how systems operate.

And if agentic AI really is the next evolution of GenAI, Cambrian’s bet is clear: the future belongs to those who feed these agents with the best data — and know what to do with it.