Unicity Labs raises USD $3m to build agentic AI rails

Unicity Labs has raised USD $3 million in seed funding as it develops a peer-to-peer protocol designed to let autonomous AI agents discover services, negotiate terms, and settle transactions without relying on shared ledgers.

Blockchange Ventures led the round, with strategic participation from Tawasal and investment from Outlier Ventures. Based in Zug, Switzerland, Unicity Labs said it will use the capital to scale work on what it calls autonomous agentic marketplaces.

Unicity is positioning its Unicity Protocol as an alternative to both centralised platforms and blockchain networks built on shared ledgers. It argues that the current infrastructure becomes a bottleneck when large numbers of software agents execute frequent transactions.

AI agents have become a focus for investors and enterprise buyers as companies look for software that can act more autonomously than conventional automation tools. Unicity Labs pointed to forecasts that the global agentic AI market could exceed USD $100 billion by 2032, while broader enterprise AI spending continues to rise.

Protocol approach

Unicity Labs describes the Unicity Protocol as a peer-to-peer cryptographic architecture that uses cryptographic objects rather than a shared ledger. The design aims to let agents verify counterparties and transact directly, without intermediaries.

The company describes the shift as moving validation to the edge of the network. It also separates transactions from validation, which it says removes a common constraint in shared-ledger systems where every transaction must be processed and recorded in a global state.

Under this model, the network confirms an asset's uniqueness rather than processing the full context of each transaction. Unicity Labs argues this reduces the network's work per transaction and improves throughput as activity increases.

The approach places Unicity Labs among a growing set of blockchain-adjacent infrastructure projects experimenting with new transaction-processing and verification models. Many target high-frequency machine-to-machine activity rather than consumer payments or human-driven trading.

Market thesis

Unicity Labs is targeting a future in which autonomous agents act as economic participants, purchasing services, allocating compute resources, and completing payment and settlement steps without human intervention.

It argues that today's systems force a trade-off: centralisation with high throughput, or decentralisation constrained by shared-ledger limitations. Large-scale agent transactions, it says, would strain both conventional systems and widely used blockchain designs.

How agent-driven commerce will be monetised remains uncertain. Even so, infrastructure providers have increasingly pitched their platforms as foundational layers for marketplaces and settlement networks operated by software agents.

Unicity Labs is also targeting multi-organisation scenarios. In those cases, companies may need systems that do not depend on a central operator for trust, identity, or settlement, while still supporting high-volume, machine-driven transactions.

Backers and governance

Blockchange Ventures focuses on early-stage blockchain investments. Tawasal runs a communications and digital services app in the Middle East and says it serves more than five million users. Outlier Ventures is an early-stage investor in Web3 businesses.

Unicity Labs has also established the Unicity Foundation in Switzerland to oversee protocol governance, grant funding, and open-source development. Foundations are a common structure for blockchain-related protocols seeking broader participation in technical direction and ecosystem funding.

The founding team includes staff who previously built and exited Guardtime, a cybersecurity infrastructure company. Unicity Labs also said its team includes PhD researchers in distributed systems, cryptography, and machine learning.

Executive comments

Mike Gault, CEO of Unicity Labs, said shared-ledger designs have constrained peer-to-peer settlement.

"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," Gault said. "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."

Matt Immerso, general partner at Blockchange Ventures, said the firm sees Unicity's architecture as a successor to the shared-ledger systems of the past decade.

"The shared-ledger model that defined the last decade was designed before the AI-driven world we are now entering," Immerso said. "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."

Eric Leandri, CEO of Tawasal, linked agent-driven commerce to changes in how merchants acquire customers.

"Today, merchants spend enormous amounts acquiring customers-buying ads, competing for attention, hoping for conversions," Leandri said. "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."

Dimitrios Chatzianagnostou, CIO of Outlier Ventures, said the absence of a shared ledger is central to the company's approach.

"The industry has spent a decade optimising shared ledgers. Unicity asked a different question entirely: what if agents don't need a shared ledger at all?" Chatzianagnostou said. "That architectural shift is what makes massive scale agent-to-agent commerce possible."