Kite Announces Investment From Coinbase Ventures to Advance Agentic Payments with the x402 Protocol 

Kite, which develops foundational infrastructure for agentic payments, announced an investment from Coinbase Ventures, extending its recent $33 million Series A round led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst. This funding supports Kite's mission to provide the necessary layer for true AI autonomy, addressing the bottleneck where AI agents are still dependent on human-approved loops. Kite's infrastructure offers a blockchain-native network featuring secure digital identity, programmable spending limits, and instant, low-cost settlements with stablecoin access, crucial for AI-to-AI commerce.

Crucially, Kite is now natively integrated with Coinbase's x402 Agent Payment Standard, positioning itself as a primary execution and settlement layer for the protocol. This deep integration allows AI agents to seamlessly manage payments via standardized intent mandates. The investment will fuel development across three areas: building a programmable trust layer via Kite's Agent Passport for verifiable identity; scaling the blockchain with x402 as the native payment rail for instant, low-cost microtransactions; and embedding its infrastructure into major platforms like PayPal and Shopify to capture the value of agentic commerce.

Kite's CEO, Chi Zhang, stated that current financial infrastructure fails AI agents, and their work is building the economic backbone for the trillions of autonomous agents expected to emerge, validating the need for an AI-native system.

(Source：BeInCrypto)