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Kite, an AI-blockchain startup backed by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst, has raised $18 million in Series A funding to build infrastructure for \u201cagentic internet.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Kite, a blockchain startup focused on enabling communication between AI agents, has secured $18 million in Series A funding. The round was led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst, with participation from 8VC, Samsung Next<\/a>, and Alumni Ventures. <\/p>\n Cofounder and CEO Chi Zhang declined to disclose the company\u2019s valuation or whether the deal included token warrants\u2014which are promised tranches of a yet-to-be-released token\u2014in addition to equity. This funding brings Kite\u2019s total capital raised to $33 million, including an earlier seed round that had not been previously announced.<\/p>\n \u201cThis funding fuels our mission to build the foundational infrastructure for the agentic internet \u2013 providing unified identity, governance and native access to stablecoin payments that enable agents to authenticate, transact, and coordinate securely without intermediaries,\u201d Kite said in the announcement<\/a> on X.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Formerly known as Zettablock, Kite<\/a> is building blockchain infrastructure designed for what Zhang calls the \u201cagentic internet,\u201d where AI-powered assistants can transact and collaborate without human intermediaries. She believes that AI agents will only be able to trust each other if there\u2019s a common system that can verify identities\u2014such as confirming that one agent genuinely represents Amazon while another is tied to OpenAI.<\/p>\n \u201cThe normal way for us to do shopping at the moment is we go to the\u00a0Amazon website or Shopify store and shop across the store, find the products,\u201d Zhang told<\/a>\u00a0Fortune<\/em>. \u201cBut in the future, it\u2019s all going to be automated. So we won\u2019t need to leave, let\u2019s say, Perplexity, or ChatGPT.\u201d<\/p>\n One envisioned application is allowing a user to simply type a request into a chatbot\u2014such as asking for a T-shirt from a Shopify store\u2014and have the AI autonomously find and purchase the product.<\/p>\nAbout Kite\u2019s vision for \u201cagentic internet\u201d<\/h2>\n