AI blockchain startup Kite raises $18M series A funding to build trust infrastructure for the agentic web

Kite, an AI blockchain startup building the backbone for the agentic web, has raised $18 million in Series A funding, bringing its total haul to $33 million. PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst co-led the round, joined by a long list of backers including 8VC, Samsung Next, SBI US Gateway Fund, Vertex Ventures, Hashed, HashKey Capital, Dispersion Capital, Alumni Ventures, Avalanche Foundation, GSR Markets, LayerZero, Animoca Brands, Essence VC, and Alchemy.

The company, previously known as Zettablock, is tackling one of the biggest missing pieces for autonomous agents: trust. Its team has years of experience building distributed infrastructure for decentralized networks like Sui, Polygon, Chainlink, and EigenLayer. Kite is now applying that knowledge to a new architecture built for agents instead of humans.

The centerpiece of its push is Kite Agent Identity Resolution, or “Kite AIR.” It’s a system that lets autonomous agents authenticate, transact, and operate without constant human oversight. Kite AIR combines programmable identity, stablecoin-based payments, and policy enforcement on a blockchain tuned for agent-to-agent interaction. Two components stand out: Agent Passport, which gives agents a verifiable identity with guardrails; and Agent App Store, where they can access services like APIs, commerce tools, and data feeds.

PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst Back Kite’s $18M Series A for Agentic Web Infrastructure

The platform already integrates with Shopify and PayPal, meaning merchants can opt in today and make themselves discoverable to AI shopping agents. Transactions are settled on-chain with stablecoins, providing full traceability and programmable permissions. Kite is lining up more integrations across commerce, finance, and data.

“From the beginning, we believed autonomous agents would be the dominant UI for the future digital economies. To function, they need structured and verifiable data, That was our first step,” said Chi Zhang, Co-Founder and CEO of Kite. “Next come identity, trust, and programmable payments. Today’s human-centric systems are too rigid and brittle for swarms of agents conducting micro-transactions at machine speed. Kite AIR solves that.”

Investors see the same gap. “Kite is doing the foundational work we believe will define how agents operate tomorrow,” said Marc Bhargava, Managing Director at General Catalyst.

Alan Du, Partner at PayPal Ventures, pointed to payments as the critical piece: “Payment has proven to be a challenging technical gap. Solutions like virtual cards provide only short-term workarounds. Latency, fees, and chargebacks further complicate things. Kite bridges this critical gap by providing stablecoin-based, millisecond-level settlement with low transaction fees and no chargeback fraud risks. This enables new economic models such as agent-to-agent metered billing, micro-subscription, and high frequency trading.”

That vision extends beyond payments. “Kite’s foundational trust infrastructure together with the benefits of a well-regulated stablecoin for agentic payments will create unprecedented opportunities,” said Steve Everett, Head of Global Market Development, PayPal Crypto and Digital Assets. “Enabling simultaneous, atomic settlement, governed by smart contracts that allow for real-time tracking and auditing across highly performant blockchain protocols will be the killer combination that delivers the promises of programmable payments in the exciting frontier of agentic commerce. This opens the door for a truly global, automated economy where people, enterprise and machine can interact with ease and trust.”

The founding team brings technical weight across AI, blockchain, and data infrastructure. CEO Chi Zhang earned a PhD in AI from UC Berkeley and led core data products at Databricks. CTO Scott Shi built real-time AI systems at Uber and was a founding engineer on Salesforce Einstein AI. The team collectively holds more than 30 patents and publications at top conferences like NeurIPS and ICML, with alumni from Uber, Databricks, Salesforce, and NEAR, and academic roots at UC Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Tokyo.

Kite’s ambition is straightforward: give agents the same building blocks people take for granted—identity, payments, and trust. With those rails in place, the agentic economy may finally start to take shape.