Ripple and Franklin Templeton have co-led a $5 million seed funding round for t54 Labs, a San Francisco-based startup building a "trust layer" for autonomous AI agents in finance. The round, which also included participation from Anagram, PL Capital, Virtuals Ventures, Blockchain Coinvestors, and ABCDE, marks the first funding for the company founded in January 2025 by Chandler Fang.
t54 Labs is developing a comprehensive platform centered on a "Know Your Agent" (KYA) framework, designed to verify the identity of AI agents, similar to traditional KYC processes. The platform includes a real-time risk engine to monitor and flag suspicious transactions before settlement, and plans to offer credit lines to verified agents based on their identity, transaction history, and risk score.
The startup's infrastructure is blockchain-agnostic but is currently live on the XRP Ledger, Solana, and Base networks. It also developed x402-secure, an open-source trust layer for the Coinbase-incubated x402 agent payment protocol, which enables AI agents to execute machine-to-machine payments autonomously.
A key strategic partnership involves Evernorth, a Ripple-backed digital asset treasury company. Evernorth plans to integrate t54's infrastructure for autonomous treasury management on the XRP Ledger, with the goal of managing over $1 billion in institutional XRP holdings through AI-driven rebalancing systems.
Tony Pecore, Senior Vice President at Franklin Templeton, stated that "t54 is building the trust and verification framework that institutional finance will require as AI agents become participants in financial markets." The funding will be used to expand the 12-person team, hiring additional engineers and a developer relations lead to support product development and deeper institutional partnerships.
Ripple's investment is seen as a strategic move to position the XRP Ledger as a preferred settlement layer for the emerging "agentic economy," where autonomous AI systems are projected to handle over 40% of enterprise workflows by 2026. The broader market opportunity is significant, with agentic AI projected to drive up to $3 trillion in corporate productivity by 2026.
