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.<\/p>\n
The company announced on Tuesday an $18 million fundraise led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst. Participants in the Series A included 8VC, Samsung<\/a> Next, and Alumni Ventures, among others. Chi Zhang, cofounder and CEO of Kite, declined to disclose her startup\u2019s valuation. She also declined to specify whether the raise was purely for equity or token warrants, which are promised tranches of a yet-to-be-released cryptocurrency.<\/p>\n The Series A follows a previously undisclosed seed round. The company has raised $33 million in total.<\/p>\n \u201cThe normal way for us to do shopping at the moment is we go to the Amazon<\/a> website or Shopify<\/a> store and shop across the store, find the products,\u201d Zhang told Fortune. \u201cBut in the future, it\u2019s all going to be automated. So we won\u2019t need to leave, let\u2019s say, Perplexity, or ChatGPT.\u201d<\/p>\n Agents and blockchains<\/strong><\/p>\n Kite\u2019s $18 million raise follows a wave of hype for AI agents. Large language models like OpenAI\u2019s GPTs or Google\u2019s 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\u2019t have direct contact with other applications online.<\/p>\n Now, more and more developers are creating AI designed for specific use cases that can call up other applications on one\u2019s device or across the internet. Some companies, like Cursor, have created agents optimized for writing code. Others have created<\/a> AI shopping agents, which can peruse items on, say, Amazon and give users options of what to buy.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf you look at the agentic level of activities, it\u2019s been, I would say, very small and experimental in nature,\u201d Alan Du, a partner at PayPal Ventures, told Fortune. \u201cI think there\u2019s a lot more infrastructure level building that still needs to happen in order for agents to truly become the transformative force that it\u2019s sort of destined for.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2014all through text.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m very excited about the future, rather than worried about competition at the moment,\u201d Zhang said, \u201cbecause it\u2019s just at the very beginning of the of the agentic era.\u201d<\/p>\n