ZUG, Switzerland — Unicity Labs, a protocol development company building the agentic autonomous internet, has closed a $3 million seed round to scale its peer-to-peer infrastructure for AI-powered marketplaces. The round was led by Blockchange Ventures, with participation from Middle East communications super app Tawasal and Web3 early-stage investor Outlier Ventures.
Investors and the Bigger Picture
Blockchange Ventures is a New York-based firm investing exclusively in early-stage blockchain companies. Tawasal, serving over five million users, offers secure messaging and lifestyle services. Outlier Ventures has backed over 370 projects. Their collective bet underscores a growing conviction: the next wave of crypto infrastructure must serve autonomous agents, not just humans.
Unicity Protocol: Ditching the Shared Ledger
The Unicity Protocol is a cryptographic architecture that lets AI agents discover services, verify counterparties, and transact at machine speed — without any intermediary or shared ledger. CEO Mike Gault said: “Satoshi’s whitepaper was titled ‘Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash.’ Seventeen years later, we still don’t have true peer-to-peer or electronic cash. Every transaction still routes through shared ledgers, introducing unnecessary bottlenecks.” He stressed that Unicity is not building another marketplace or trading platform; it provides the underlying rails for agents to find each other and settle directly, frictionlessly.
Matt Immerso, General Partner at Blockchange Ventures, added: “The shared-ledger model was designed before the AI-driven world. Unicity separated transactions from validations. The network only confirms an asset’s uniqueness rather than processing its entire context, delivering breakthroughs in speed, scale, and cost — absolute prerequisites for an agentic future.”
Eric Leandri, CEO of Tawasal, noted: “In an agentic economy, merchants don’t market to people. They sell to agents that know what their users want. Unicity’s infrastructure makes that possible and will fundamentally change the economics of commerce.”
Team and Foundation
The Unicity Labs team previously built and exited cybersecurity firm Guardtime and includes PhD researchers in distributed systems, cryptography, and machine learning. The company recently established the Unicity Foundation in Switzerland to oversee protocol governance, grant funding, and open-source development. Its whitepaper is available on GitHub.