Unicity Labs Raises $3 Million to Scale Autonomous Agentic Marketplaces

Unicity Labs, building Agentic marketplaces for machine-speed commerce, led by Mike Gault and the team, has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Blockchange Ventures, with participation from Tawasal Al Kaleej, a Middle East-based communications super app, and Outlier Ventures, a leading Web3 early-stage investor.

The funding aligns with the emergence of AI agents as economic participants, with the global agentic AI market projected to exceed $100 billion by 2032. Unicity Labs has introduced the Unicity Protocol, a peer-to-peer cryptographic architecture enabling autonomous agents to discover services, verify counterparties, and transact at machine speed without intermediaries or shared ledgers.

The Unicity Labs team, previously responsible for building and exiting Guardtime, includes PhD researchers specializing in distributed systems, cryptography, and machine learning. The company has also established the Unicity Foundation in Switzerland to oversee governance, grants, and open-source development.

Increasing autonomy in AI agents requires continuous large-scale service discovery, negotiation, and transaction settlement without human involvement. Current infrastructure presents a trade-off: centralization through major platforms at the expense of trustlessness, or reliance on traditional blockchains that become bottlenecks when millions of agents transact simultaneously.

Referencing the Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto, Mike Gault of Unicity Labs noted that most transactions still rely on shared ledgers, creating bottlenecks. Unicity is positioned as a base infrastructure enabling agents to discover counterparts and settle transactions directly at scale.

The shared-ledger model underpinning the past decade was designed before the emerging AI-driven environment, according to Matt Immerso of Blockchange Ventures. By separating transactions from validation, confirming only an asset’s uniqueness rather than its full context, Unicity Labs is presented as achieving major improvements in speed, scale, and cost required for autonomous-agent economies.

Tawasal, a communications super app serving over five million users in the Middle East, joined the round as a strategic investor. According to Eric Leandri, merchant acquisition currently relies on advertising and attention competition, whereas an agentic economy enables sales directly to instructed agents ready to transact, an outcome enabled by Unicity Labs and positioned to reshape commerce economics.

Rather than optimizing shared ledgers, the key question is whether agents require one at all, according to Dimitrios Chatzianagnostou of Outlier Ventures. This architectural shift is presented as enabling large-scale agent-to-agent commerce, as pursued by Unicity Labs.