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Kite

Category: AI Infrastructure

Kite is building the payments layer for the agent economy — a purpose-built blockchain for autonomous agents to transact, coordinate, and operate at scale. Kite was founded in 2022. The company is led by Chi Zhang. Based in San Francisco, USA. Team size: 11-50. Total funding raised: $33 million. Latest round: Series A. Key investors include ["PayPal Ventures","General Catalyst","8VC","Samsung Next","SBI US Gateway Fund"].

Founded
2022
Headquarters
San Francisco, USA
Team size
11-50
Total funding
$33 million

Value proposition

Kite provides autonomous agents with verifiable trust and a purpose-built chain to transact, coordinate, and operate at scale — with programmable identity, native stablecoin payments, and policy enforcement.

Products and solutions

["Kite Chain (L1 Blockchain)","Kite Agent Passport","Kite AIR (Agent Identity Resolution)","Agent App Store"]

Unique value

Kite is the first AI payment blockchain — providing autonomous agents with verifiable identity, programmable permissions, and native stablecoin payments on a high-throughput L1 with sub-second deterministic finality.

Target customer

The primary target customers are AI developers, data scientists, and companies that are building and utilizing AI models and autonomous agents.

Industries served

["Decentralized AI","Blockchain","Artificial Intelligence"]

Technology advantage

Kite's core advantage is its purpose-built L1 blockchain with EVM compatibility, sub-second deterministic finality, native stablecoin settlement, dedicated agent pay lanes, and the Kite Passport system for programmable identity and policy enforcement.

How they differentiate

Kite differentiates by being the first blockchain purpose-built for AI agent payments — combining programmable identity (Agent Passport), native stablecoin settlement, and a high-throughput L1 with sub-second finality, enabling machine-speed microtransactions that human-centric systems cannot support.

Main competitors

["Symmetri","Relevance AI"]

Key partnerships

["Avalanche (L1 deployment)","PayPal (stablecoin settlement)","Shopify (commerce integration)","Coinbase Ventures"]

Notable customers

["Vishwa"]

Major milestones

["Secured $18M in Series A funding (Sept 2025).","Launched Kite AIR with Agent Passport and Agent App Store.","Mainnet went live as Avalanche L1 (April 2026).","Received additional investment from Coinbase Ventures."]

Growth metrics

Not publicly available.

Market positioning

Kite is positioning as the payments layer for the agent economy — the foundational trust and settlement infrastructure enabling autonomous AI agents to transact, coordinate, and operate at scale, with initial focus on agentic commerce.

Geographic focus

The competition is primarily concentrated in the United States, particularly in Silicon Valley, but the market for AI agent infrastructure is global.

Patents and IP

Publicly available information on specific patents could not be found.

About Chi Zhang

PhD in AI from UC Berkeley; led core data products at Databricks.

Official website: