Unicity Labs, a Swiss-based protocol development company, has raised $3 million in seed funding to build cryptographic infrastructure designed for autonomous AI agent transactions. Blockchange Ventures led the round, with participation from UAE-based communications platform Tawasal and Web3 investor Outlier Ventures.
Unicity Labs Raises $3M to Scale Autonomous Agentic Marketplaces
Seed round led by blockchain VC firm Blockchange Ventures. The Unicity Protocol enables AI agents to form peer-to-peer trustless marketplaces at machine speed
ZUG, SWITZERLAND – February 17th, 2026 – Unicity Labs,… pic.twitter.com/RBPoZZp81Z
— Unicity (@unicity_labs) February 17, 2026
Source: https://x.com/unicity_labs/status/2023748787056079244
What the Company Is Building
Unicity Labs, founded in 2025, is developing what it calls the Unicity Protocol – a cryptographic framework intended to let software agents locate counterparties, authenticate transactions, and settle value exchanges directly with one another, without routing through centralized platforms or shared blockchain ledgers.
The company’s core technical claim is that its architecture verifies whether a given digital asset has been previously spent without requiring every participant to maintain a synchronized copy of the full transaction history. If that approach works at scale, it would sidestep a long-standing constraint in distributed systems: the tradeoff between decentralization and throughput that has limited conventional blockchains when handling high volumes of concurrent, low-value transactions.
The protocol is pre-mainnet. A whitepaper is available through the company’s GitHub repository, but no independent performance benchmarks or third-party audits have been publicly disclosed.
The Team Behind the Protocol
The founding team’s primary credential is Guardtime, an Estonian cybersecurity infrastructure company founded in 2007 that deployed its Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI) technology across Estonian government systems, NATO, Lockheed Martin, Verizon, and Ericsson. Guardtime raised approximately $24.5 million over its lifetime from investors including SICPA, Horizons Ventures, and Ambient Sound Investments.
The company states that the team “previously built and exited” Guardtime. CEO Mike Gault co-founded Guardtime and is listed as the principal behind the new venture. Other contributors include Ahto Buldas, Guardtime’s former chief scientist, along with researchers holding doctorates in distributed systems, cryptography, and machine learning, according to the company’s website.
A Swiss-domiciled entity, the Unicity Foundation, has been established alongside the company to handle governance decisions, distribute grants, and coordinate open-source contributions.
Who Invested
Blockchange Ventures, founded in 2017, invests exclusively in early-stage blockchain infrastructure. The firm has made 77 investments to date. Its recent deal activity includes participation in blockchain security firm TestMachine’s $6.5 million Series A (December 2025) and quantum-resilient chip maker Niobium Microsystems’ $23 million Series A (December 2025). Matt Immerso, who leads new investments at the firm, previously worked at McKinsey’s private equity practice and Insight Partners.
In a statement, Immerso characterized Unicity’s approach as a departure from the shared-ledger paradigm, arguing that separating transaction execution from validation is a necessary precondition for agent-scale commerce. That framing positions the investment as a thesis-driven bet on infrastructure re-architecture rather than a wager on near-term application traction.
Outlier Ventures, founded in 2014, operates one of the larger Web3 accelerator programs and claims a portfolio of more than 370 investments. Dimitrios Chatzianagnostou, the firm’s CIO, has a background in aerospace engineering and previously worked on tokenizing industrial goods through a joint venture involving Mercedes-Benz, Bosch, and the Stuttgart Stock Exchange. In his statement on the deal, Chatzianagnostou framed the investment around Unicity’s architectural departure from shared ledgers, calling it a prerequisite for agent-to-agent commerce at scale.
Tawasal joined as a strategic investor. The Abu Dhabi-based super app, launched in 2019, serves over five million users and recently completed an integration with Crypto.com to offer crypto trading through its platform. CEO Eric Leandri described the investment in terms of a broader shift in commerce: rather than merchants spending to acquire human customers through advertising, agents instructed by users would transact directly with merchants. That vision remains speculative, but it signals a strategic interest from a consumer-facing platform in backend settlement infrastructure.
Where This Sits in the Market
The raise arrives at a moment when the intersection of AI agents and crypto infrastructure has become one of the more active corners of early-stage venture capital.
The macro picture: Blockchain and crypto startups raised $6.6 billion in Q1 2025 alone, putting the sector on pace to surpass $20 billion in annual funding, according to CB Insights. AI agent startups saw more than 200 equity deals in 2024, with activity pacing at similar levels into 2025. Cross-sector investments at the AI-crypto intersection grew 22% year-over-year in 2025.
The sub-sector: Agent-focused projects surged from 5% to 36% of all crypto-AI deals between the second half of 2023 and the first half of 2025, according to Nevermined’s analysis of deal flow. McKinsey research projects that agentic commerce could generate $3 to $5 trillion globally by 2030, while Gartner estimates AI “machine customers” could influence up to $30 trillion in annual purchases by that date. These are projections, not certainties, but they explain why capital is flowing toward the infrastructure layer.
Comparable raises in early 2026:
| Company | Round | Amount | Focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Airrived | Seed | $6.1M | Enterprise agentic AI |
| Sphinx | Seed | $7.1M | AI compliance agents |
| Stacks | Series A | $23M | Agentic enterprise finance |
| Maestro AI | Pre-seed | $1.2M | Agentic operating system for crypto |
| Overmind | Seed | $2.69M | AI agent supervision layer |
| Unicity Labs | Seed | $3M | AI agent settlement infrastructure |
At $3 million, Unicity’s raise is on the smaller end of this cohort. That is consistent with pre-mainnet protocol companies where investor conviction rests on team pedigree and architectural thesis rather than measurable traction. The Guardtime background gives the team a verifiable track record in deploying cryptographic systems at government and enterprise scale, which distinguishes it from many seed-stage protocol teams that lack deployment history.
Why It Matters And What Remains Unproven
The broader capital environment increasingly favors infrastructure over applications. VC investment in blockchain infrastructure, staking, wallets, and custody rose 35% in 2025, while institutional focus shifted away from consumer crypto apps by a similar margin. Funded projects with tangible business models attracted over 70% of total crypto VC investment.
Unicity Labs fits the infrastructure thesis but currently sits at the earliest stage of validation.
What Comes Next
The company’s stated near-term priorities are protocol development, engineering hiring, and building out the Unicity Foundation’s grant program to attract open-source contributors. Whether its approach to decoupling transaction execution from network-wide validation gains developer traction will likely become clearer as the protocol moves from whitepaper to testnet. The foundation’s governance structure and grant activity may serve as early signals of ecosystem momentum.
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