To date, humans have been the primary users of the Internet. But as artificial intelligence continues to develop, we think AI agents will increasingly power significant portions of online traffic. To make this a reality, the foundational architecture of the Internet will need to evolve. Agents will need identities, programmable governance, and seamless payment flows to operate at scale. This infrastructure gap we believe represents both a massive challenge and an extraordinary opportunity. 

Kite is building this foundational trust infrastructure that can enable AI agents to interact, transact, and collaborate autonomously. We led Kite’s seed round, and now we’re propelling our partnership by investing in their $18M Series A alongside PayPal Ventures.

The Trust Layer for Autonomous Agents

In an autonomous agentic internet, aligning identity, governance, and payments at the protocol layer is crucial. This is precisely what Kite is doing, utilizing technology like stablecoins and cryptographic attestations. Their platform uses programmable, wallet-bundled public key identities to give agents unique credentials, deploys smart-contract governance to provide “code-as-law” execution, and leverages programmable digital currencies to underpin the trust infrastructure. 

They recently launched Kite Agent Identity Resolution (Kite AIR), a pioneering solution that enables autonomous agents to authenticate, transact, and operate independently in real-world environments. The system has two core components: Agent Passport, which provides verifiable identity with operational guardrails, and Agent App Store, where agents can discover and pay to access services such as APIs, data, and commerce tools. The platform is already live on commerce platforms including Shopify and PayPal, allowing store owners to become discoverable to AI shopping agents with purchases settled on-chain using stablecoins.

Building the Rails for the Machine-to-Machine Economy

Founders Chi Zhang and Scott Shi bring what we think is an exceptional combination of visionary thinking and deep technical expertise. Chi earned a PhD in AI from UC Berkeley and led core data products at Databricks; Scott built real-time AI infrastructure at Uber and was a founding engineer on Salesforce Einstein AI. And they’ve assembled a team that has years of experience in distributed infrastructure systems, having previously built large-scale, real-time data infrastructures serving decentralized networks like Sui, Polygon, Chainlink, and EigenLayer.

“From the beginning, we believed that autonomous agents would become the dominant UI to digital economies of the future. Yet today’s systems are too rigid and brittle for swarms of agents transacting at machine speed. Kite AIR fixes that.”– Chi Zhang, Co-Founder and CEO

By enabling agents to transact, coordinate, and operate independently, Kite is creating the trust and transaction layer that we think will power the next generation of autonomous digital interactions. We look forward to continuing our partnership with Chi, Scott, and the Kite team as they build what we believe will become the foundational infrastructure for the agentic internet.