Unicity Labs has raised $3 million in seed funding to advance its peer-to-peer cryptographic architecture designed for autonomous AI agents and agentic marketplaces. The round was led by Blockchange Ventures, with participation from Tawasal and Outlier Ventures. The company said the capital will support the development of the Unicity Protocol, which aims to enable AI agents to form trustless, peer-to-peer marketplaces at machine speed.
Headquartered in Switzerland, Unicity Labs recently established the Unicity Foundation to oversee protocol governance, grant funding, and open-source development. The team previously built and exited Guardtime, a cybersecurity infrastructure company, and includes PhD researchers in distributed systems, cryptography, and machine learning.
Unicity positions its protocol as an alternative to traditional shared-ledger blockchain infrastructure. As AI agents increasingly operate autonomously — discovering services, negotiating terms, and executing transactions without human intervention — the company argues that existing centralized systems and blockchains create bottlenecks when scaled to millions of simultaneous agent-to-agent transactions.
The Unicity Protocol replaces shared ledgers with peer-to-peer cryptographic objects, enabling agents to verify counterparties and settle transactions directly without intermediaries. According to the company, this architectural shift separates transaction processing from validation by allowing the network to confirm an asset’s uniqueness rather than processing its entire transactional context.
The global agentic AI market is projected to exceed $100 billion by 2032, underscoring the timing of the raise as AI agents transition from conceptual tools into economic actors capable of autonomous commerce.
Tawasal, a Middle East-based communications super app serving more than five million users, joined the round as a strategic investor, highlighting the potential for agent-driven commerce models that connect merchants directly to AI agents acting on behalf of users.
Unicity Labs said the funding will accelerate protocol development and ecosystem expansion as it builds infrastructure for what it describes as the autonomous agentic internet.
KEY QUOTES:
“Satoshi’s whitepaper was titled ‘Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash.’ Seventeen years later, we still don’t have true peer-to-peer or electronic cash. Every transaction still routes through shared ledgers, introducing unnecessary bottlenecks. Unicity changes that. We’re not building another marketplace or trading platform. We’re building the infrastructure beneath them. Unicity provides the place and the rails that allow agents to discover each other and settle directly, frictionlessly, peer-to-peer, at the scale and speed the agentic economy demands.”
Mike Gault, Chief Executive Officer, Unicity Labs
“The shared-ledger model that defined the last decade was designed before the AI-driven world we are now entering. Unicity didn’t just patch the old system, they built its successor thanks to their critical innovation that separates transactions from validations. By having the network simply confirm an asset’s uniqueness rather than processing its entire context, Unicity delivered the breakthroughs in speed, scale, and cost that are absolute prerequisites for a future powered by autonomous agents.”
Matt Immerso, General Partner, Blockchange Ventures
“Today, merchants spend enormous amounts acquiring customers – buying ads, competing for attention, hoping for conversions. In an agentic economy, merchants don’t market to people. They sell to agents – agents that have been instructed about what their users want and are ready to transact. Unicity’s infrastructure makes that possible, and it will fundamentally change the economics of commerce.”
Eric Leandri, Chief Executive Officer, Tawasal
“The industry has spent a decade optimizing shared ledgers. Unicity asked a different question entirely: what if agents don’t need a shared ledger at all?”
Dimitrios Chatzianagnostou, Chief Investment Officer, Outlier Ventures
