In the span of three years, the idea that AI agents could carry out complex tasks on behalf of humans has shifted from academic speculation to the focus of a growing startup ecosystem. Chi Zhang, cofounder and CEO of Kite, believes those agents will need infrastructure to function at scale. “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,” Zhang said.
The idea has drawn attention from investors. Kite just announced an $18 million Series A round led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst, with participation from 8VC, Samsung Next, Alumni Ventures, and others. The new funding brings its total capital raised to $33 million.
Building for AI Agents
Kite, formerly known as Zettablock, describes its platform as a “base layer” for what it calls the agentic internet. The company’s core system, Kite Agent Identity Resolution (AIR), is designed to let autonomous agents authenticate themselves, transact, and operate without human supervision. It provides three key components: cryptographic identity for models and agents, programmable governance over permissions and spending, and native stablecoin payments with near-zero fees.
The product includes an “Agent Passport,” a verifiable identity system with guardrails, and an “Agent App Store,” where AI agents can discover and pay to access services like APIs, datasets, or commerce tools. It already integrates with Shopify and PayPal, allowing merchants to become visible to AI-powered shopping agents. Purchases are settled on-chain with stablecoins, a mechanism the company argues eliminates chargebacks and reduces costs.
Zhang, who holds a doctorate in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley, has framed the challenge in terms of scale. Current human-centric payment and authentication systems, she says, are “too rigid and brittle for swarms of agents conducting micro-transactions at machine speed”. The company is building its own blockchain, which it says will support this activity through what it calls “Proof of Artificial Intelligence.”
Investor Signals
Backers of the company see Kite’s infrastructure as an early answer to unresolved technical questions about autonomous agents. “Kite is the first real infrastructure that is purpose-built for the agentic economy. Payment has proven to be a challenging technical gap,” Alan Du, a partner at PayPal Ventures, told Fortune. He pointed to problems with existing stopgaps such as virtual cards, citing latency, fees, and fraud. “Kite bridges this critical gap by providing stablecoin-based, millisecond-level settlement with low transaction fees and no chargeback fraud risks.”
The market Kite is pursuing has become a focal point in Silicon Valley. Startups such as Cursor are building specialized coding agents, while others are developing shopping or productivity-focused systems.
Yet as Du noted, the infrastructure needed to support these tools remains limited. “If you look at the agentic level of activities, it’s been, I would say, very small and experimental in nature. I think there’s a lot more infrastructure level building that still needs to happen in order for agents to truly become the transformative force that it’s sort of destined for”.
A Significant Challenge
For now, Kite’s role is less about consumer-facing applications than enabling other developers and enterprises to build reliable autonomous systems. Zhang has argued that blockchains, as decentralized ledgers, offer a shared reference point for agent identity and provenance across companies. One early use case the firm is building is enabling users to ask a chatbot like ChatGPT to shop across merchants such as Shopify without ever leaving the conversation.
The scope of the challenge is significant. Analysts project that the rise of AI agents could create a $240 billion market over the next decade. But the timeline for when autonomous agents will move beyond pilots into scaled commercial use remains uncertain.
Zhang acknowledged the early stage of development: “I’m very excited about the future, rather than worried about competition at the moment, because it’s just at the very beginning of the of the agentic era”.
