TechFlow news, August 21 — According to Decrypt, Skyfire, a startup founded by former Ripple executives, has announced the completion of an $8.5 million seed funding round to develop cryptocurrency payment solutions for AI agents. Investors include Circle (the issuer of USDC), Ripple, Gemini, and Tim Draper, the prominent Silicon Valley billionaire and Bitcoin advocate’s venture capital firm.
The company has built an open-source payment system enabling autonomous AI agents to conduct various transactions online, such as purchasing data storage, creative assets, airline tickets, and daily necessities. Its payment network operates on the USDC stablecoin and is currently deployed on the Polygon network, with plans to expand to other blockchains in the future.
Amir Sarhangi, co-founder and CEO of Skyfire, said traditional payment systems fail to meet the needs of AI, while cryptocurrencies and blockchain offer a 24/7 solution for microtransactions with low fees and high efficiency. The company has already partnered with several clients, including an auto parts manufacturer serving Indian automotive service centers and AI infrastructure providers, and is currently in discussions with multiple large language model (LLM) developers to adopt its USDC-based AI agent payment solution.
