t54 Labs secures $5M seed to harden agentic finance trust
Context & Funding
San Francisco startup t54 Labs announced a $5M seed round co-led by Anagram, PL Capital and Franklin Templeton, with participation from Ripple, Virtuals Ventures, Blockchain Coinvestors and ABCDE. The founders kept governance compact: no new board or advisory seats were taken, a signal that investors want exposure without reshaping control. Chandler Fang framed the financing as capacity to productize verification and controls for agents that transact without human initiation.
Product Architecture & Rails
t54 packages four capability clusters: digital identity for autonomous actors, a live risk engine that intercepts suspicious flows, agent credit facilities underpinned by transactional attestations, and a unified settlement layer to reduce operational friction. The stack is rail-agnostic and already interoperates with on-chain networks including XRP Ledger, Solana and Base, and the team published an open-source trust module aligned with the Coinbase-incubated x402 protocol. Blockchain is presented as the auditable, programmable ledger for settlement; t54 positions that capability as a compliance and accountability backbone rather than a speculative token play.
Market Signals & Partnerships
A strategic collaboration with Evernorth, a Ripple-backed digital-asset treasury firm, moves t54 from tooling into trial with institutional treasuries planning token holdings at scale. Mr. Pecore of Franklin Templeton framed the need for infrastructure that maps identity, risk and settlement to institutional workflows, confirming buy-side interest in agentic operations. That institutional validation short-circuits traditional vendor adoption cycles and pushes custodians and treasury teams to test agent-native controls sooner than planned.
Team, Roadmap & Near-Term Priorities
t54 operates with a compact engineering core and disclosed plans to add two engineers plus one developer-relations or business development hire to accelerate integrations and institutional pilots. The seed proceeds are intended to industrialize the verification, risk scoring, and settlement primitives and to fund compliance work required for regulated counterparties. Expect roadmaps focused on credit primitives for agents and production-grade auditability for partners integrating agentic flows.
Source: The Block.
Read Our Expert Analysis
Create an account or login for free to unlock our expert analysis and key takeaways for this development.
By continuing, you agree to receive marketing communications and our weekly newsletter. You can opt-out at any time.
Recommended for you
TRM Labs secures $70M to accelerate AI-driven blockchain investigations
TRM Labs closed a $70 million Series C that values the company at $1 billion and will bankroll expanded AI engineering to improve transaction surveillance and criminal disruption. The funding, led by Blockchain Capital with participation from major financial and venture investors, aims to push investigative tooling into broader use by law enforcement and financial institutions.
Neo Financial Secures $68.5M to Launch Canada’s First Fintech Securitization Program
Neo Financial completed a $68.5 million equity raise from a syndicate including more than 100 Canadian investors and several institutional backers to fund its inaugural securitization initiative. The firm plans to use the capital to adopt a capital-efficient funding model, leveraging AI-driven credit models to scale its lending book toward multi‑billion-dollar capacity while aligning underwriting standards with major Canadian banks.
Unicity Labs raises $3M to build peer-to-peer protocol for autonomous AI agents
Unicity Labs closed a $3 million seed round led by Blockchange Ventures to develop a protocol that lets autonomous AI agents find services and transact directly without shared ledgers. The raise brings strategic support from Tawasal and Outlier Ventures and funds a Switzerland-based foundation to steward open-source development and governance.
Tether backs LayerZero Labs to accelerate cross‑chain stablecoins and autonomous finance
Tether Investments has taken an equity stake in LayerZero Labs to strengthen omnichain messaging and a blockchain‑agnostic USDT, aiming to cut cross‑chain liquidity fragmentation and enable software agents to hold and move funds. The move comes alongside Tether’s parallel push into a U.S. regulated stablecoin (USAT) issued through Anchorage Digital Bank, underscoring a two‑pronged strategy that pairs interoperability bets with efforts to bring onshore, supervised rails for institutional users.
Coinbase launches Agentic Wallets to let autonomous AI agents hold and transact crypto
Coinbase launched Agentic Wallets, a modular wallet layer that lets autonomous AI agents hold funds and execute on‑chain operations under programmable safety limits. The product dovetails with broader industry work to standardize agent identities, reputation and payment endpoints across chains — a trend that could speed machine‑to‑machine finance but raises new security, custody and regulatory questions.
A trust fabric for agentic AI: stopping cascades and enabling scale
A single compromised agent exposed how brittle multi-agent AI stacks are, prompting the creation of a DNS-like trust layer for agents that combines cryptographic identity, privacy-preserving capability proofs and policy-as-code. Early production use shows sharply faster, more reliable deployments and millisecond-scale orchestration while preventing impersonation-driven cascades.
AppFactor secures $4M seed to automate enterprise software upkeep
AppFactor raised $4 million in seed financing to scale a platform that uses autonomous AI agents to detect, repair, and redeploy enterprise applications. The round will fund go-to-market expansion and development of automated refactoring paths, including automated migrations toward performance-oriented languages like Rust.
Memcyco Secures $37M Series A to Scale Agentless Defenses Against Account Takeover
Memcyco raised $37 million in a Series A round, bringing total funding to $47 million, to accelerate global rollouts of its agentless platform for detecting and disrupting account-takeover and impersonation fraud. The company cites rapid revenue and customer growth and says its systems have blocked millions of ATO attempts, positioning it for expansion into Latin America and broader financial services adoption.