AI and crypto are the buzziest buzzwords in Silicon Valley, and startups have tried to combine the two since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. The results so far have been mixed at best, but two brand-name venture capitalist firms see a winner in Kite, a startup building a blockchain to spur communication between different AI applications.
The company announced on Tuesday an $18 million fundraise led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst. Participants in the Series A included 8VC, Samsung Next, and Alumni Ventures, among others. Chi Zhang, cofounder and CEO of Kite, declined to disclose her startup’s valuation. She also declined to specify whether the raise was purely for equity or token warrants, which are promised tranches of a yet-to-be-released cryptocurrency.
The Series A follows a previously undisclosed seed round. The company has raised $33 million in total.
“The normal way for us to do shopping at the moment is we go to the Amazon website or Shopify store and shop across the store, find the products,” Zhang told Fortune. “But in the future, it’s all going to be automated. So we won’t need to leave, let’s say, Perplexity, or ChatGPT.”
Agents and blockchains
Kite’s $18 million raise follows a wave of hype for AI agents. Large language models like OpenAI’s GPTs or Google’s Gemini are akin to big brains that can generate responses in text to human queries. Traditionally, these models are general purpose and have sat on servers that don’t have direct contact with other applications online.
Now, more and more developers are creating AI designed for specific use cases that can call up other applications on one’s device or across the internet. Some companies, like Cursor, have created agents optimized for writing code. Others have created AI shopping agents, which can peruse items on, say, Amazon and give users options of what to buy.
“If you look at the agentic level of activities, it’s been, I would say, very small and experimental in nature,” Alan Du, a partner at PayPal Ventures, told Fortune. “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.”
Formerly known as Zettablock, Kite aims to build that infrastructure. Zhang, who has a doctorate in statistics from the University of California, Berkeley, envisions an internet where AI agents interact with each other without humans in between. She believes that, for AI agents to trust one another, there needs to be a shared database that identifies one, for example, as truly a representative of Amazon and another as one from OpenAI.
Blockchains, which are decentralized databases that no one controls, are the solution, she thinks, which is why Kite is building a blockchain for AI. One of her company’s first projects is to build a means through which users can ask ChatGPT to find them, say, t-shirts from a store using Shopify and purchase the items—all through text.
“I’m very excited about the future, rather than worried about competition at the moment,” Zhang said, “because it’s just at the very beginning of the of the agentic era.”