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 Series A follows a previously undisclosed seed round. The company has raised $33 million in total.
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.
“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.”
