Pilot Protocol announced it has launched from stealth with $4.5 million in seed funding led by Version One Ventures, with participation from Precursor Ventures, Night Capital, Todd & Rahul Capital, and angel investors Lenny Rachitsky and Ben Tossell.
Pilot Protocol is designed to give AI agents their own address and allow them to discover, trust, and work with other agents directly, without human setup, addressing a gap the company says exists as agents have historically been built to work in isolation, tied to a single owner and machine.
Agents join the network by running a single line of install code, and the company said roughly 250,000 agents are currently on the network, generating two billion requests per day, with the network growing by as much as 10 percent a day during its early months.
The network also runs an App Store built for agents rather than people, where companies publish tools that agents can find and use autonomously; the company said agents have generated more than 30,000 autonomous installs of partner applications in the two weeks since the App Store’s launch. Pilot Protocol is also rolling out agent-to-agent payments, allowing agents to earn and spend credit for useful work without a card.
KEY QUOTES:
“We never marketed Pilot to anyone. Agents found it, decided it was useful, and recommended it to each other. Our customers aren’t people, they’re agents, and the autonomous economy everyone keeps predicting for next year is already running on this network.”
Razvan Roman, Co-Founder and CEO, Pilot Protocol
“Every network for people was an app built on top of the internet. Pilot is the layer underneath, where agents connect to each other. Whoever owns that layer is foundational to everything above it.”
Boris Wertz, Founder and General Partner, Version One Ventures
