Why We Invested in Kite
Building the Trust Layer for the Agentic Internet
At Essence Venture Capital, we back technical founders who are rethinking the infrastructure and tooling behind how software systems operate. Kite is one of those companies.
We're thrilled to share that we've invested in Kite, which we believe is building the trust layer for the agentic internet. This isn't just another AI wrapper or developer convenience tool. Kite is a ground-up rethink of how autonomous agents will identify themselves, coordinate with each other, and transact in a machine-to-machine economy.
But first, the team.
Betting on Builders with Deep Systems Vision
Kite's co-founding team: Chi Zhang and Scott Shi
Chi Zhang and Scott Shi bring a rare combination of deep systems thinking and dogged execution. They and their team have been thinking about identity, coordination, and trust for years across stints at Uber, Databricks, Salesforce, and through academic research spanning Berkeley, MIT, and Oxford.
What stood out to us from day one wasn't just the technical architecture. It was their conviction in the fundamentals and the discipline to build for the long game. In every conversation, we saw the same traits we look for in infrastructure founders: clarity, patience, and a refusal to paper over structural problems with short-term hacks.
They aren't chasing hype. They're building decades early for an inevitability.
From Isolated Agents to Coordinated Systems
Over the past 18 months, we've seen a surge in AI agents. Systems that can act on your behalf, coordinate tools, and complete goals across software environments. But in practice, most agents today are brittle and isolated. They work within narrow domains, with no persistent memory, no interoperable standard, and most critically, no trustworthy identity or native way to move money.
This is more than a developer inconvenience. It's a structural flaw.
Without a verifiable way to identify agents, enforce rules, or handle settlements, we risk replicating the very silos autonomous systems were supposed to break. Agents can't reason across services, collaborate with other agents, or carry out transactions on their own. And the moment they're expected to move money or access sensitive systems, trust collapses.
The missing layer isn't more model routing. It's shared infrastructure for who the agent is, what it can do, and how it pays.
Kite AIR: The First Step Toward Agent Infrastructure
Kite's first release, Kite AIR (Agent Identity Resolution), starts with two deceptively simple primitives:
Agent Passport: A verifiable identity system that allows agents to operate across environments while maintaining trust, context, and permissioning. Like a real passport, it can define rights and limits and ensure traceability across systems.
Agent App Store: A discovery and monetization layer where agents can call services, models, and tools and settle usage automatically via embedded payments. This means agents can now pay other agents or APIs, enabling an open services economy.
Together, these building blocks let agents behave more like autonomous actors, not just scripts in a sandbox. With programmable governance, traceable actions, and real-time, low-fee settlement backed by a custom blockchain optimized for agent use cases, Kite creates the neutral substrate that the agent ecosystem has lacked.
We've already seen this play out in a Shopify/PayPal integration, where Kite agents can browse storefronts and complete purchases fully autonomously with verifiable payment rails and usage tracking on-chain.
It's not a demo. It's a glimpse of the next internet.
Why This Infrastructure Matters Now
As more software is written by agents instead of people, trust infrastructure becomes the new backbone:
Without identity, we get spoofed agents and opaque coordination.
Without governance, we get agents acting out of bounds, without accountability.
Without native payments, we get a bottleneck that forces every transaction back through a human.
Kite solves for all three, creating the conditions for a machine-to-machine economy that is open, programmable, and verifiable from the ground up.
With fresh funding from an $18M Series A round co-led by General Catalyst and PayPal Ventures, bringing their total funding to $33M, Kite is expanding its ecosystem of integrated services, launching new developer APIs, and deepening the functionality of its identity, governance, and payment layers.
The Stakes: Building Infrastructure That Lasts
In a space moving as fast as AI, there's an instinct to "move fast and break things." The Kite team is doing the opposite: move fast, but build things that won't break when agents actually run the world.
This is the kind of infrastructure we believe developers, enterprises, and platforms will build on for the next decade. Not because it's flashy, but because it becomes the default.
🧑💻 -> If you're building agents or thinking about how your infrastructure will interface with them, we strongly recommend diving into Kite's docs, playing with the App Store, and joining the conversation at gokite.ai
To Chi, Scott, and the whole Kite team: thank you for letting us be a part of this journey. You're building the backbone of a new internet, and we're honored to help support it!
