AEON raises $8M to build settlement layer for AI agents

AEON closed an $8 million pre-seed round led by YZi Labs to develop a settlement layer for what it terms the agentic economy. The company plans to use the funds for product development, cross-chain infrastructure and partnerships that connect autonomous AI agents with merchant payment rails.

The financing featured participation from IDG Capital, HashKey Capital, Stanford Blockchain Builders Fund, Oak Grove Ventures, SevenX Ventures, Alchemy Ventures, Draper Dragon, Contribution Capital and Uphonest Capital. YZi Labs manages more than $10 billion in assets and led the round as AEON advances its roadmap.

AEON launched an AI payment product in May that the company says enables AI agents to execute on-chain transactions and reach more than 50 million real-world merchants. The startup reports serving over 2 million users and processing about 30 million transactions per month. AEON is an early partner of Coinbase’s x402 protocol and has deployed an x402 Facilitator on BNB Chain to support verifiable transactions, on-chain settlement and immutable receipts for service providers in that network.

AEON’s technical stack includes a Protocol Kernel x402 layer that embeds settlement instructions into HTTP 402 status codes, tying payment logic directly to API requests and service subscriptions. The company’s distributed Trust Hub verifies transaction payloads with atomic finality, so settlements are irreversible once cleared. AEON also integrates agent-native protocols such as ERC-8004, Google AP2 and MCP to link digital agent interactions to real-world settlement rails.

The company says its roadmap began with cross-chain infrastructure and payment standards and is now advancing toward verification of execution. Planned features include a native Know Your Agent (KYA) credit system and full-stack AI financial services to support autonomous coordination, transaction and settlement among agents in complex scenarios.

AEON’s founding team includes executives and engineers with experience at Binance, Chainlink, Google, HSBC and GrabPay. The company describes a Physical Gateway that extends continuous value flows between agents into Agent-to-Merchant payments.

AEON intends to use the new capital to deepen protocol integrations, scale its verification services and expand its settlement network internationally. No specific timelines were disclosed. Eddie Li, AEON’s CEO and co-founder, commented, “This funding accelerates our settlement-layer build and deepens collaboration with partners such as Coinbase and BNB Chain.”