Seed round led by blockchain VC firm Blockchange Ventures. The Unicity Protocol enables AI agents to form peer-to-peer trusted marketplaces at machine speed
ZUG, Switzerland, February 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Unicity laboratoriesa 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 Tawasala communications super app in the Middle East, and Outlier Ventures, a leading Web3 early-stage investor.
The timely increase comes as AI agents (software entities that can independently discover services, negotiate terms and execute transactions) are evolving from conceptual tools to economic actors. The global AI market is expected to exceed $100 billion by 2032. In line with this, Unicity Labs has developed the Unicity Protocol, a peer-to-peer cryptographic architecture that enables autonomous AI agents to discover services, authenticate counterparties, and execute transactions at machine speed, without intermediaries or shared ledgers.
The Unicity Labs team, which previously founded and exited cybersecurity infrastructure company Guardtime, consists of PhD students in distributed systems, cryptography and machine learning. The company recently established the Unicity Foundation in Switzerland to oversee protocol management, grant funding and open source development.
As AI agents become increasingly autonomous, they will need to continuously discover services, negotiate terms, and handle transactions, at scale, without human intervention. Today’s infrastructure forces a trade-off: centralize through big tech, sacrifice trustlessness, or rely on traditional blockchains, which create a 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 flows through shared ledgers, creating unnecessary bottlenecks,” the company said Mike GaultCEO of Unicity Labs. “Unicity is changing that. We’re not building a new marketplace or trading platform. We’re building the infrastructure underneath. Unicity provides the place and the rails that allow agents to discover each other and establish themselves instantly, frictionlessly, peer-to-peer, at the scale and speed the agentic economy demands.”
“The shared ledger model that has defined the last decade was designed before the AI-powered world we are now entering,” he says Matt Immersogeneral partner at Blockchange Ventures. “Unicity not only patched the old system, they built the successor thanks to their critical innovation that separates transactions from validations. By letting the network simply confirm the uniqueness of an asset instead of processing its entire context, Unicity has delivered the speed, scale and cost breakthroughs that are imperatives for a future powered by autonomous agents.”
Tawasala 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 of money acquiring customers – buying ads, competing for attention, hoping for conversions,” he says Erik LeandriCEO of Tawasal. “In an agentic economy, sellers don’t target people. They sell to agents – agents who are instructed in 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 completely different question: What if agents don’t need a shared ledger at all?” said Dimitrios Chatzianagnostou, CIO of Outlier Ventures. “That architectural shift enables large-scale trade between agents.”
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 agent internet. The Unicity Protocol replaces shared ledgers with peer-to-peer cryptographic objects, allowing AI agents to discover, transact, and settle autonomously. Unicity was founded by blockchain and cryptography veterans and is backed by Blockchange Ventures, Outlier Ventures and Tawasal. The Unicity Foundation, based in Switzerland, oversees protocol development and community governance. More information uniqueness.ai | https://x.com/unicity_labs | https://sphere.unicity.network
About Blockchange Ventures
Blockchange Ventures is a New York-based venture capital firm that invests exclusively in early-stage blockchain companies, protocols and applications. Founded in 2017, the company backs extraordinary founders who are 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 in the Middle East. Launched in Abu Dhabi in 2019, Tawasal offers messaging, video conferencing, commerce 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 largest early-stage investor in Web3, with a renowned reputation as the go-to authority for Web3 founders, investors and partners. With a portfolio of more than 370 global investments, Outlier Ventures has helped raise $1 billion in seed funding.
SOURCE Unicity Labs
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