AEON announced it has raised $8 million in a pre-seed funding round led by YZi Labs, with participation from IDG Capital, HashKey Capital, Stanford Blockchain Builders Fund, Oak Grove Ventures, SevenX Ventures, Alchemy Ventures, Draper Dragon, Contribution Capital, and Uphonest Capital.
The Hong Kong-based company is building a settlement layer designed for the “agentic economy,” a framework where AI agents autonomously participate in commerce and exchange value across the internet. The funding will support AEON’s efforts to develop infrastructure that enables Agent-to-Agent (A2A) transactions and connects AI-driven commerce with real-world merchant settlement.
AEON said it was one of the earliest official partners of Coinbase’s x402 protocol and launched its first AI payment product in May. The platform allows AI agents to conduct on-chain transactions and connect to more than 50 million merchants globally.
The company also recently partnered with BNB Chain to launch the x402 Facilitator, which was built natively on BNB Chain infrastructure. According to AEON, the system supports verifiable transactions, on-chain settlement, and immutable receipts for millions of service providers within the ecosystem.
AEON’s infrastructure leverages AI-native protocols including x402, ERC-8004, Google AP2, and MCP. Its Protocol Kernel x402 Stack embeds settlement logic into API requests and service subscriptions using HTTP 402 status codes, enabling real-time clearing between AI agent transactions. The company said its distributed Trust Hub verifies transaction payloads with atomic finality to ensure irreversible settlement.
The company’s roadmap includes expanding its cross-chain infrastructure and payment verification systems into execution verification, while growing its settlement network across emerging markets and traditional financial rails. AEON also plans to introduce a native KYA credit system and broader AI financial services designed to support autonomous agent collaboration and settlement.
AEON said its founding team includes executives and engineers with experience at Binance, Chainlink, Google, HSBC, and GrabPay.
KEY QUOTE:
“AEON is not just bridging AI and real-world commerce, we are building the settlement layer the agentic economy inherently requires. As production relations shift toward an economy powered by autonomous agents and value exchange between AIs, we believe a settlement layer built for the agentic economy will emerge and this economic paradigm needs its own financial foundation. This funding empowers us to accelerate that mission, advancing our settlement layer built for AI, and deepening collaboration with ecosystem partners like Coinbase and BNB Chain.”
Eddie Li, CEO And Co-Founder, AEON
