Seed round led by blockchain VC firm Blockchange Ventures. Unicity’s protocol enables AI agents to form peer-to-peer peer-to-peer marketplaces at machine speed
ZUG, Switzerland , Feb. 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Unicity Labs, a protocol development company building the autonomous Internet of Things, has successfully raised $3 million in funding. The round was led by Blockchange Ventures with participation from Tawasal, a Middle East-based super-communications app, and Outlier Ventures, Web3’s lead early-stage investor.
Timeliness increases as AI agents (software entities that can autonomously discover services, negotiate terms, and execute transactions) transform from conceptual tools to economic entities. The global AI agency market is expected to exceed $100 billion by 2032. To that end, Unicity Labs has developed the Unicity Protocol, a peer-to-peer cryptographic architecture that enables autonomous AI agents to discover services, verify counterparties, and perform transactions at machine speed without intermediaries or shared ledgers.
The Unicity Labs team, which previously built and spun off 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 management, grant funding and open source development.
As AI agents become more autonomous, they will need to discover services, negotiate terms, and settle transactions continuously at scale without human intervention. Today’s infrastructure forces businesses to: centralize through big technology, sacrifice trustlessness, or rely on traditional blockchains that allow millions of agents to transact simultaneously.
Satoshi’s Whitelist was called Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash. 17 years later, we still don’t have true peer-to-peer money or electronic cash. Every transaction still goes through shared ledgers, introducing unnecessary barriers,” said Mike Gault, CEO of Unicity Labs. “Unicity is changing that. We no longer build a marketplace or trading platform. We are building the infrastructure under them. Unicity provides the space and rails that allow agents to discover each other and deploy directly, seamlessly, peer-to-peer, at the scale and speed the agency economy demands.”
“The shared ledger model that has defined the last decade was designed before the artificial world we are now entering,” said Matt Immerso, General Partner of Blockchange Ventures. “Unicity not only fixed the old system, but created its successor thanks to its important innovation that separates transactions from confirmations. By having the network instead of processing all its context, Unicity simply verified the uniqueness of the asset, Unicity achieved advances in speed, scale and value, which are absolute prerequisites for the future provided by independent agents.”
Tawasal, a leading communications app in the Middle East serving more than five million users, participated in the round as a strategic investor.
Eric Leandry, CEO of Tavasal, said: “Marketers today spend a lot of money to acquire customers – buy ads, compete for attention, hope.” “In the agency economy, merchants don’t market to people. They sell to agents—agents who are instructed in what their users want and are willing to trade. Unicity’s infrastructure has the potential to fundamentally change the economics of commerce.”
“The industry has spent a decade optimizing shared ledgers. Unicity asked a completely different question: what if agents didn’t need a shared ledger at all?” said Dimitrios Chatzianagnostou, CIO of Outlier Ventures. “This architectural shift is what makes scalable agent-to-agent business possible.”
Read the Unicity white paper 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 builds agency-independent internet infrastructure. The Unicity protocol replaces shared ledgers with peer-to-peer cryptographic entities, allowing AI agents to independently discover, transact and compute. Founded by blockchain and cryptography veterans, Unicity is backed by Blockchange Ventures, Outlier Ventures and Tawasal. The Swiss-based Unicity Foundation oversees protocol development and community management. Learn more at unicity.ai | https://x.com/unicity_labs | https://sphere.unicity.network
About Blockchain Ventures
Blockchange Ventures is a New York-based venture capital firm that exclusively invests in early-stage blockchain companies, protocols and applications. Founded in 2017, the company supports extraordinary founders to build the infrastructure of the decentralized economy.
About Tavsal
Tawasal SuperApp is a secure messaging and digital lifestyle platform in the UAE serving more than five million users across the Middle East. Launched in Abu Dhabi in 2019, Tawasal offers messaging, video conferencing, business and lifestyle services with a focus on data independence and regional infrastructure development.
About Outlier Ventures
Founded in 2014, Outlier Ventures is the world’s leading Web3 investor and has a reputation as an authority on Web3 founders, investors and partners. With a portfolio of over 370 global investments, Outlier Ventures has helped raise $1 billion in seed funding.
Source Unicity Labs
