Why PayPal, OpenAI, and Uber insiders invested $33M in Kite AI

While everyone’s talking about ChatGPT, Silicon Valley is quietly building the next wave — autonomous AI agents. Systems that buy, sell, negotiate, and pay on their own. But there’s a problem: the internet wasn’t built for them.

Imagine a simple scenario. You’re in ChatGPT and ask it to buy you a cat t-shirt. Behind the scenes, a chain of events must unfold: the system finds a store on Shopify, verifies its authenticity, makes a payment, arranges delivery. But how does it prove it represents OpenAI? How does the store know it’s not a scammer? Who guarantees security?

This is exactly the problem Kite AI solves — a startup that just raised $18 million from PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst. Total funding: $33 million.

What is Kite AI?

Kite AI is a Layer 1 blockchain built specifically for autonomous AI agents.

Founded by Chi Zhang (PhD in statistics, UC Berkeley) and Scott Shi, the company previously operated as Zettablock before scaling and rebranding. Their thesis: the AI agent market will grow to $240 billion by 2035, and these systems need infrastructure as fundamental as HTTP is to the internet.

Alan Du from PayPal Ventures: “At the agentic level, activity is still very small and experimental. There’s a lot more infrastructure building that needs to happen for agents to become truly transformative.”

The Investment

PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst led the $18 million Series A round, joined by 8VC, Samsung Next, Alumni Ventures, Avalanche Foundation, Animoca Brands, and Alchemy.

When executives from OpenAI, PayPal, Uber, AWS, and Circle invest personal money, it’s a signal: they see the future Kite AI is building.

The Core Problem: Trust in an Autonomous World

Current internet architecture assumes there’s always a human on the other end. A person with a credit card, passport, email address. Someone who can click a CAPTCHA and prove they’re not a robot. But what happens when there are robots on both ends?

A trust problem emerges. Autonomous systems must interact with each other without a central arbiter. Traditional solutions — OAuth, API keys, banking systems — are too slow, expensive, and centralized for an economy where millions of agents execute microtransactions every second.

Blockchain becomes not a buzzword, but a necessity. A decentralized database that no one controls, but everyone can trust.

How Kite AI Solves This

Kite AI solves the trust problem through three mechanisms that work as a unified system.

Cryptographic identity gives each agent a digital passport impossible to forge. When an Amazon system interacts with OpenAI, both parties can verify each other’s authenticity instantly.

Programmable governance lets owners set clear operating rules: maximum $100 per day, specific purchase categories, no international transfers. Even if compromised, the system cannot exceed these boundaries.

Instant payments complete the picture. Transactions take one second, fees under $0.000001. One agent can pay another three-tenths of a cent for data processing — economically viable microtransactions that traditional payment systems simply cannot support.

Kite Chain: Built for AI

To realize this vision, Kite developed their own blockchain that has already processed over 1.9 billion agent interactions.

The most interesting part? The consensus mechanism. Kite introduces Proof of Artificial Intelligence (PoAI) — rewarding real contribution to the ecosystem, not mining energy or staked wealth. The system aligns incentives with actual value agents bring to the network, rather than capital or computing power.

The Ecosystem

Technology is half the picture. The other half is the ecosystem.

Kite is building the world’s first agent network — an App Store for AI where specialized systems handle shopping, taxis, food delivery, and hotel booking. The beauty? It works inside your favorite service. You’re in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Claude, say what you need, and assistants handle everything autonomously.

Chi Zhang describes it simply: “We won’t need to leave Perplexity or ChatGPT to make purchases. Everything will be automated.”

In Action

Kite — it’s a working product with live integrations.

Shopify enables autonomous purchases with stablecoin payments. PayPal handles payment processing. An AI agent even ordered lunch for the CTO via Uber Eats — autonomously selecting dishes, paying, and tracking delivery.

The numbers: over 1.9 billion agent interactions processed, 20 million testnet users, 51 million blockchain addresses created.

Building the Culture

Kite understands that technology needs community. That’s why they launched **Wind Runner**— a program for content creators building around the agentic economy.

Participants receive Soul-Bound Tokens. The goal: onboard creators who will shape discourse around autonomous economies. First month target: ~1,000 creators.

Get Involved

Want to try Kite AI in practice? The testnet is already available. Connect your EVM wallet at Testnet, get test tokens, and start exploring the ecosystem. Bridges between networks are available at Bridge, swaps, staking and other dApps. Quests on Galxe

Why This Actually Matters

The economics are simple: AI agents will execute more transactions than humans. Millions of micropayments daily — too small and frequent for Visa or traditional rails.

These systems need money that works instantly, globally, 24/7, with near-zero fees. They need to verify identity and trust each other without intermediaries. Blockchain isn’t philosophical here — it’s practical infrastructure.

Kite is building that layer. Open infrastructure for autonomous economies, similar to what Linux did for operating systems or Ethereum for DeFi.

While the industry debates AI’s impact, Kite is building infrastructure for autonomous agent economies. Real integrations, millions of testnet users, backing from PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst.

The goal isn’t flashy — it’s foundational. If successful, you won’t notice Kite in ten years. It’ll just work in the background, like TCP/IP does today.

Links

• Website
• Documentation
• X/Twitter
• Discord
• Testnet

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