Unicity Labs, a developer of autonomous agentic marketplace infrastructure, has entered a strategic partnership with Indian startup incubator PadUp Ventures. The collaboration, announced on February 27, 2026, aims to accelerate the development of agentic commerce infrastructure across India's vast startup ecosystem.
The core of the partnership is the launch of a dedicated Agentic Commerce Track within PadUp's acceleration program, PrepUp. This track will focus on identifying, mentoring, and funding Indian startups building applications on the Unicity Protocol. These applications will enable AI agents to autonomously discover, negotiate, and transact for use cases ranging from SMB sales automation and supply chain coordination to cross-border payments.
The initiative addresses a significant market need. As Pankaj Thakar, Partner at PadUp Ventures, highlighted, "India has 63 million SMBs, most of them bandwidth-constrained... AI agents change that equation entirely; but only if the infrastructure exists for agents to transact at scale. That's what Unicity provides." Qualified startups in the program will gain access to investment from both PadUp's network and Unicity's ecosystem fund, alongside joint go-to-market support targeting Indian businesses.
The technological foundation is the Unicity Protocol, a novel peer-to-peer blockchain architecture. It is designed to overcome limitations of traditional blockchains and centralized platforms for machine-speed commerce. The protocol eliminates the shared ledger, enabling private negotiation and atomic settlement. It boasts a claimed throughput exceeding 300 million transactions per second with 1-second finality and fixed microcent fees, positioning it as infrastructure for an autonomous economy.
Mike Gault, CEO of Unicity Labs, expressed strong confidence in the Indian market: "India doesn't just adopt technology, it scales it... We believe Indian founders will build some of the most important agentic commerce applications in the world." India's position as the world's third-largest startup ecosystem, with over 112,000 recognized startups, a massive SMB base, deep developer talent, and expanding digital infrastructure, makes it a prime target for this initiative.
Unicity Labs, headquartered in Abu Dhabi with a foundation in Switzerland, has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Blockchange Ventures, with participation from Outlier Ventures and Tawasal. PadUp Ventures, founded in 2015 and based in Gurugram, claims its programs offer a 500% higher chance of success for early-stage tech startups and has helped over 350 companies generate $200 million in value.
