Kite, a San Francisco-based company developing trust infrastructure for the agentic web, has raised US$18 million in Series A funding, bringing its total funding to US$33 million.

The round was led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst, with participation from 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.

Formerly known as Zettablock, Kite has built its platform on experience in distributed infrastructure systems supporting networks such as Sui, Polygon, Chainlink, and EigenLayer.

Its recent launch, Kite Agent Identity Resolution (Kite AIR), provides identity, payment, and policy enforcement tools for autonomous agents.

The system includes two components: Agent Passport, a verifiable identity framework with operational controls, and Agent App Store, a marketplace where agents can access services including APIs and commerce tools.

Kite AIR integrates with platforms such as Shopify and PayPal, enabling merchants to be discoverable to AI shopping agents and settle purchases on-chain using stablecoins.

“From the beginning, we believed autonomous agents would be the dominant UI for the future digital economies. To function, they need structured and verifiable data, that was our first step,”

said Chi Zhang, Co-Founder and CEO of Kite.

“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 solves that.”

Alan Du, Partner at PayPal Ventures, added:

“Kite is the first real infrastructure that is purpose-built for the agentic economy. Payment has proven to be a challenging technical gap. Solutions like virtual cards provide only short-term workarounds. Kite bridges this gap by providing stablecoin-based, millisecond-level settlement with low transaction fees and no chargeback fraud risks.”

Kite’s leadership team includes CEO Chi Zhang, who holds a PhD in AI from UC Berkeley and previously led core data products at Databricks, and CTO Scott Shi, who built real-time AI infrastructure at Uber and was a founding engineer of Salesforce Einstein AI.

The team has experience from companies such as Uber, Databricks, Salesforce, and NEAR, with academic backgrounds from institutions including UC Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Tokyo.

Featured image credit: Edited by Fintech News America, based on image by EyeEm via Freepik