Kite, a company building the foundational infrastructure for agent payments, today announced an investment from Coinbase Ventures. The raise is an extension of Kite’s recent $33 million Series A funding led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst. These investments reflect growing confidence in the autonomous agent economy and Kite’s role in building the infrastructure that powers agent-to-agent payments and AI-driven commerce.
The funds used in this investment will help solve critical bottlenecks in the AI revolution. While AI agents can now manage complex tasks, from booking travel to executing transactions, they still rely on human-approved operational loops. Kite’s infrastructure provides the missing layer for true autonomy. It is a blockchain-native network that provides secure digital identities, programmable spending limits, and instant low-cost payments with native access to stablecoins, essential for AI-to-AI commerce.
To extend this agent-to-agent blockchain network, Kite has natively integrated with Coinbase’s x402 Agent Payment Standard, establishing itself as the protocol’s primary execution and payment layer. As one of the first L1s to fully implement x402-compatible payment primitives, Kite enables AI agents to seamlessly send, receive, and coordinate payments through standardized intent instructions. This deep chain-level integration is designed to accelerate adoption of the x402 standard and unlock the full potential of the agent economy.
Coinbase Ventures’ investment supports Kite’s continued product and infrastructure development across three converging market shifts that are shaping the autonomous economy.
The need for a programmable trust layer: AI agents operate independently and require verifiable identities and enforceable rules. Kite’s Agent Passport provides this foundation, giving each agent a unique cryptographic identity and programmable governance controls. This ensures that all autonomous transactions are secure, compliant, and verifiable on-chain.
Scalable blockchain with x402 protocol as AI’s native payment rail: The high-volume microtransaction nature of agent commerce demands instant and low-cost payments that traditional finance cannot support. Kite’s infrastructure is purpose-built for this reality, fully integrated with Coinbase’s x402 agent payment standard, and leverages stablecoins and high-throughput blockchains to enable sub-second finality and minimal fees, unlocking an economic model only possible at this scale.
The rise of agent commerce as a growth engine: Trillions of AI agents are predicted to emerge, representing the next frontier for digital consumers. Kite integrates with major platforms such as PayPal and Shopify and embeds their infrastructure to enable autonomous agents to discover and pay for these services. This will enable Kite to capture the value of the next seismic shift in e-commerce.
“Today’s financial infrastructure is broken when AI attempts to exploit it,” said Chi Zhang, CEO and co-founder of Kite. “Our mission is to build the economic backbone for trillions of autonomous agents coming online. This vote of confidence from Coinbase Ventures, along with our existing investors, proves that the future of AI is not just intelligent, it’s agentic, and we need AI-native systems to thrive. We’re putting that infrastructure in place today.”
About kite
Kite is building the first blockchain for agent payments. It is the underlying infrastructure that allows autonomous AI agents to operate with verifiable identities, programmable governance, and native access to stablecoin payments. Founded by AI and data infrastructure veterans from Databricks, Uber, and UC Berkeley, Kite has raised $33 million from top investors including PayPal, General Catalyst, Coinbase Ventures, and major blockchain foundations.
For more information, please visit Kite official website or follow Kite on X.
About Coinbase Ventures
Coinbase Ventures supports great entrepreneurs working to advance the cryptocurrency ecosystem and support Coinbase’s mission to create more economic freedom in the world. We partner with founding teams at an early stage and invest broadly across all categories within the on-chain economy. We’ve invested in hundreds of teams building everything from Layer 1 protocols, Web3 infrastructure, centralized onramps, decentralized finance, NFTs, Metaverse technology, developer tools, and more. We strive to be a strategic partner to founders and take a collaborative approach to investing.
