Unicity Labs, a protocol development company focused on building the infrastructure for an "agentic autonomous internet," has successfully raised $3 million in a seed funding round. The investment was led by blockchain-focused venture capital firm Blockchange Ventures, with strategic participation from Middle Eastern communications super app Tawasal and leading Web3 early-stage investor Outlier Ventures.
The funding announcement, made from Zug, Switzerland, comes as AI agents—software entities capable of independently discovering services, negotiating terms, and executing transactions—are evolving from conceptual tools into active economic actors. The global market for such agentic AI is projected to exceed $100 billion by 2032.
At the core of Unicity Labs' vision is the Unicity Protocol, a novel peer-to-peer cryptographic architecture designed to enable autonomous AI agents to discover services, verify counterparties, and transact at machine speed without relying on intermediaries or traditional shared ledgers like blockchains. The company argues that current infrastructure presents a trade-off: centralization through big tech platforms, which sacrifices trustlessness, or reliance on blockchains, which can become bottlenecks when millions of agents attempt to transact simultaneously.
"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," said Mike Gault, CEO of Unicity Labs. "Unicity changes that. We’re building the infrastructure beneath them... that allows agents to discover each other and settle directly, frictionlessly, peer-to-peer."
Matt Immerso, General Partner at lead investor Blockchange Ventures, highlighted the protocol's foundational innovation: "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."
The Unicity Labs team includes PhD researchers in distributed systems, cryptography, and machine learning, and previously built and exited cybersecurity infrastructure company Guardtime. The company has also established the Unicity Foundation in Switzerland to oversee protocol governance, grant funding, and open-source development.
Strategic investor Tawasal, a super app with over five million users in the Middle East, sees Unicity's technology as transformative for commerce. "In an agentic economy, merchants don’t market to people. They sell to agents... Unicity’s infrastructure makes that possible, and it will fundamentally change the economics of commerce," said Tawasal CEO Eric Leandri.
