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, Feb. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Unicity Labs, a protocol development company building the agentic autonomous internet, has successfully raised $3 million in seed funding. The round was led by Blockchange Ventures, with participation from Tawasal, a Middle East-based communications super app, and Outlier Ventures, a leading Web3 early-stage investor.
The timely raise comes as AI agents (software entities that can independently discover services, negotiate terms, and execute transactions) evolve from conceptual tools into economic actors. The global agentic AI market is projected to exceed $100 billion by 2032. In line with this, Unicity Labs has developed the Unicity Protocol, a peer-to-peer cryptographic architecture enabling autonomous AI agents to discover services, verify counterparties, and transact at machine speed without intermediaries or shared ledgers.
The Unicity Labs team, which previously built and exited Guardtime, a cybersecurity infrastructure company, includes PhD researchers in distributed systems, cryptography, and machine learning. The company recently established the Unicity Foundation in Switzerland to oversee protocol governance, grant funding, and open-source development.
As AI agents become increasingly autonomous, they will need to discover services, negotiate terms, and settle transactions continuously, at scale, without human intervention. Today’s infrastructure forces a trade-off: centralize through big tech, sacrificing trustlessness, or rely on traditional blockchains, which bottleneck when millions of agents transact simultaneously.
“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,” said Mike Gault, CEO of Unicity Labs. “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.”
“The shared-ledger model that defined the last decade was designed before the AI-driven world we are now entering,” said Matt Immerso, General Partner at Blockchange Ventures. “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.”
Tawasal, a leading communications super app in the Middle East serving over five million users, participated in the round as a strategic investor.
“Today, merchants spend enormous amounts acquiring customers – buying ads, competing for attention, hoping for conversions,” said Eric Leandri, CEO of Tawasal. “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.”
“The industry has spent a decade optimizing shared ledgers. Unicity asked a different question entirely: what if agents don’t need a shared ledger at all?” said Dimitrios Chatzianagnostou, CIO of Outlier Ventures. “That architectural shift is what makes massive scale agent-to-agent commerce possible.”
Read the Unicity whitepaper here: https://github.com/unicitynetwork/whitepaper/releases/tag/latest
Mike Gault, Founder of Unicity Labs, and Matt Immerso, Partner at Blockchange Ventures, are available for interviews.
About Unicity Labs
Unicity Labs is building the infrastructure for the autonomous agentic internet. The Unicity Protocol replaces shared ledgers with peer-to-peer cryptographic objects, enabling AI agents to discover, transact, and settle autonomously. Founded by veterans of blockchain and cryptography, Unicity is backed by Blockchange Ventures, Outlier Ventures, and Tawasal. The Unicity Foundation, established in Switzerland, oversees protocol development and community governance. Learn more unicity.ai | https://x.com/unicity_labs | https://sphere.unicity.network
About Blockchange Ventures
Blockchange Ventures is a New York-based venture capital firm investing exclusively in early-stage blockchain companies, protocols, and applications. Founded in 2017, the firm backs extraordinary founders building the infrastructure for the decentralized economy.
About Tawasal
Tawasal SuperApp is a UAE-based secure messaging and digital lifestyle platform serving over five million users across the Middle East. Launched in 2019 in Abu Dhabi, Tawasal offers messaging, video conferencing, trading, and lifestyle services with a focus on data sovereignty and regional infrastructure development.
About Outlier Ventures
Founded in 2014, Outlier Ventures is the world’s leading Web3 early stage investor, with a renowned reputation as the go-to authority for Web3 founders, investors and partners. With a portfolio of over 370 global investments and Outlier Ventures has helped raise USD 1 billion in seed funding.
SOURCE Unicity Labs
