PayPal Ventures has led an $18 million funding round in Kite, a company focused on developing trust infrastructure for AI-generated autonomous payments.
PayPal was joined by investors including General Catalyst, 8VC, Samsung Next, Alumni Ventures, SBI US Gateway Fund, Vertex Ventures, Dispersion Capital, Avalanche Foundation, GSR Markets, LayerZero, Hashed, HashKey Capital, Animoca Brands, Essence VC, and Alchemy. This new financing increases Kite’s total cumulative funding to $33 million.
Formerly known as Zettablock, Kite recently launched Kite Agent Identity Resolution, a product that allows autonomous agents to authenticate, transact, and operate independently in real-world environments. This system offers programmable identity, native stablecoin payments, and policy enforcement on a blockchain optimized for these agents.
Kite AIR consists of two main components: the Agent Passport, which provides a verifiable identity with operational safeguards, and the Agent App Store, where agents can access a variety of services such as APIs and commerce tools. It is currently available through open integrations with popular platforms like Shopify and PayPal.
Chi Zhang, Co-Founder and CEO of Kite, stated, “From the beginning, we believed autonomous agents would be the dominant UI for the future digital economies. They need structured and verifiable data, which was our first step. Next come identity, trust, and programmable payments. Today’s human-centric systems are too rigid and brittle for swarms of agents conducting micro-transactions at machine speed. Kite AIR addresses that.”
Currently, any PayPal or Shopify merchant can opt in through the Kite Agent App Store, making them discoverable to AI shopping agents. Orders are settled on-chain with full traceability, utilizing stablecoins and programmable permissions.
Alan Du, Partner at PayPal Ventures, remarked, “Kite is the first real infrastructure purpose-built for the agentic economy. Payment has been a challenging technical issue. Solutions such as virtual cards are merely short-term fixes. Latency, fees, and chargebacks complicate matters further. Kite bridges this critical gap by offering stablecoin-based, millisecond-level settlement with low transaction fees and no chargeback fraud risks, enabling new economic models like agent-to-agent metered billing, micro-subscriptions, and high-frequency trading.”