PayPal leads funding round in agentic AI firm Kite

PayPal was joined by General Catalyst, 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.

The new financing brings total cumulative funding for the vendor to $33 million.

The company, formerly known as Zettablock, recently launched Kite Agent Identity Resolution, a product that enables autonomous agents to authenticate, transact, and operate independently in real-world environments. The system delivers programmable identity, native stablecoin payment, and policy enforcement on a blockchain optimised for autonomous agents.

Kite AIR includes two core components: Agent Passport, a verifiable identity with operational guardrails; and Agent App Store, where agents can discover and pay to access services such as APIs, data, and commerce tools. It is live today through open integrations with popular commerce platforms like Shopify and PayPal.

“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,” says 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.”

Today, using publicly available APIs, any PayPal or Shopify merchant can opt in through the Kite Agent App Store and become discoverable to AI shopping agents. Purchases are settled on-chain with full traceability, using stablecoins and programmable permissions.

Alan Du, Partner at PayPal Ventures, comments: “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. Latency, fees, and chargebacks further complicate things. Kite bridges this critical gap by providing stablecoin-based, millisecond-level settlement with low transaction fees and no chargeback fraud risks. This enables new economic models such as agent-to-agent metered billing, micro-subscription, and high frequency trading.”