Paypal and General Catalyst lead $ 18 million in investment in the Kite Startup Blockchain AI

The company announced on Tuesday a collection of funds of $ 18 million led by Paypal Ventures and General Catalyst. The participants in the A series included the 8VC, the following Samsung and the former companies, among others. Chi Zhang, co -founder and CEO of Kite, refused to disclose the evaluation of his startup. She also refused to specify whether the increase was only for equity or token mandates, which are promised slices of a cryptocurrency still to be published.

The series has followed a previously unknown seed tour. The company has raised $ 33 million in total.

“The normal way for us to shop for the moment is that we are going to the Amazon website or the shopify store and shopping through the store, to find the products,” said Zhang Fortune. “But in the future, everything will be automated. So we will not need to leave, say, perplexity or pussy.”

Agents and blockchains

The $ 18 million kite increase has a wave of media threw for AI agents. Models of large languages ​​such as Openai GPTs or Google Gemini are similar to large brains that can generate text responses to human requests. Traditionally, these models are for general purposes and have sat on servers that do not have direct contact with other online applications.

From now on, more and more developers create an AI designed for specific use cases which can call other applications on its device or on the Internet. Some companies, such as the cursor, have created optimized agents to write code. Others have created AI commercial agents, which can browse items, for example, Amazon and offer users options of what to buy.

“If you look at the level of agent activity, I would say, I would say, of a very small and experimental nature,” said Alan du, Paypal Ventures partner, said Fortune. “I think there are many more infrastructure level buildings that must still occur so that agents really become the transformative force for which it is somehow intended.”

Formerly known as Zettablock, Kite aims to build this infrastructure. Zhang, who has a doctorate in statistics from the University of California in Berkeley, plans an internet where AI agents interact with each other without humans. She thinks that, for AI agents to trust themselves, there must be a shared database that identifies one, for example, like a real representative of Amazon and another as one of Openai.

Blockchains, which are decentralized databases that no one controls, is the solution, she thinks, which is why Kite builds a blockchain for AI. One of the first projects of his business is to create a means by which users can ask Chatgpt to find them, for example, a store t-shirts using Shopify and buy items, all by SMS.

“I am very enthusiastic about the future, rather than worrying about the competition for the moment,” said Zhang, “because it’s just at the very beginning of the agency’s era.”