Unicity Labs Secures $3M to Build AI Agent Infrastructure

Jan de Vries · 2026-02-18

Here's something that caught my eye recently. Unicity Labs, a Swiss company based in Zug, just landed $3 million in Seed funding. They're not your typical startup. They're building the foundational infrastructure for what they call the 'autonomous agentic internet.' Think of it as the roads and traffic lights for AI agents, the software that will one day handle transactions and negotiations on our behalf. The funding round was led by Blockchange Ventures, with Tawasal (a Middle East communications super app) and Outlier Ventures also joining in. It's a significant vote of confidence in a pretty ambitious vision. ### The Problem with Today's Systems Mike Gault, the CEO of Unicity Labs, put it bluntly. He pointed out that Satoshi Nakamoto's original Bitcoin whitepaper was titled 'Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash.' Yet, seventeen years later, we still don't have a true peer-to-peer system. Every transaction, he argues, still gets funneled through shared ledgers, creating bottlenecks. "Unicity changes that," Gault says. "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."  ### A Broader Trend in European Tech This isn't happening in a vacuum. When you look around Europe, there's a clear pattern of investment flowing into AI infrastructure. For instance: - SurrealDB raised a $20.5 million Series A for its AI database platform. - Toyo secured $3.9 million in Seed funding to build secure AI agents. - Overmind got $2.5 million for AI agent supervision tools. - Italy's Contents raised $6.4 million for AI orchestration workflows. Unicity's $3 million raise fits right into this trend. Investors are betting big on the foundational tools and protocols needed to make autonomous AI agents a scalable, practical reality. It's about building the plumbing for the next generation of the internet.  ### How Unicity's Technology Works So, what makes Unicity different? Matt Immerso, a General Partner at Blockchange Ventures, explained it well. He said the shared-ledger model that powered the last decade of innovation was designed before our current AI-driven world. "Unicity didn't just patch the old system, they built its successor," Immerso notes. Their key innovation separates transactions from validations. Instead of the network processing every single detail of a transaction, it simply confirms an asset's uniqueness. This breakthrough in design is what they claim delivers the speed, scale, and low cost required for a future run by autonomous agents. Founded just last year in 2025, the company is developing the Unicity Protocol. This system aims to replace shared ledgers with peer-to-peer cryptographic objects. The goal? To let AI agents discover each other, transact, and settle deals completely autonomously. ### The Team Behind the Vision The team isn't starting from scratch. They previously built and sold Guardtime, a major cybersecurity infrastructure company. The group includes PhD researchers specializing in distributed systems, cryptography, and machine learning. They've also set up the Unicity Foundation in Switzerland to handle protocol governance and support open-source development. ### Why This Matters for Commerce Eric Leandri, CEO of Tawasal, gave a compelling example of the potential impact. "Today, merchants spend enormous amounts acquiring customers – buying ads, competing for attention, hoping for conversions," he says. The model is inefficient and expensive. "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." It's a fascinating shift to consider. We're moving from a world where software assists us, to one where software agents act independently as economic players. The raise comes at a moment when these AI agents are evolving from conceptual tools into genuine economic actors. The infrastructure to support that shift is now being built, and Unicity Labs just got $3 million to help lay those crucial foundations.