AEON Raises $8M Led by YZi Labs to Build the Settlement Layer for Agentic Economy

HONG KONG, May 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- AEON, the settlement layer built for the agentic economy, today announced it has successfully closed an $8 million pre-seed funding round. The round was led by YZi Labs, with participation from a robust group of leading investors, including IDG Capital, HashKey Capital, Stanford Blockchain Builders Fund, Oak Grove Ventures, SevenX Ventures, Alchemy Ventures, Draper Dragon, Contribution Capital, and Uphonest Capital.

The funding will accelerate AEON's mission to build the financial backbone required for a new economic paradigm, where AI reshapes production relations across the internet and becomes an active participant in global commerce. AEON is building the settlement layer that this new paradigm demands, powering the agentic economy at scale, and bridging Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interactions with real-world merchant settlement.

As one of the earliest official partners of Coinbase's x402 protocol, AEON has been at the forefront of turning the concept of AI payments into reality. The company launched its first AI payment product in May, enabling AI agents to execute on-chain transactions and connect to over 50 million real-world merchants across the globe. With AEON, AI enters the marketplace, where ideas, intent, and intelligence can directly move value.

In partnership with BNB Chain, AEON recently launched the x402 Facilitator, built natively on the BNB Chain infrastructure. This enables verifiable transactions, on-chain settlement, and immutable receipts for millions of service providers within the BNB ecosystem, building payment infrastructure constructed for the agentic economy at internet scale.

By leveraging AI native protocols like x402, ERC-8004, Google AP2, and MCP, AEON enables autonomous and verifiable AI agent transactions that bridge the gap between digital agent interactions and real-world settlement. Its Protocol Kernel x402 Stack encapsulates payment instructions into HTTP 402 status codes, embeds settlement logic directly into every API request or service subscription, and ensures real-time clearing between A2A transactions. The distributed Trust Hub verifies transaction payloads with atomic finality, guaranteeing irreversible settlement. This architecture enables continuous value flows between agents, and through AEON's Physical Gateway, extends into Agent-to-Merchant scenarios where agents can pay.

Building in phases, AEON's roadmap begins with a completed foundation of cross-chain infrastructure and payment standards. It is now advancing into trust and scale, evolving from payment verification to execution verification while expanding its global settlement network across emerging markets and traditional financial rails. Looking ahead, AEON aims to unlock fully autonomous agent collaboration supported by a native KYA credit system and with full-stack AI financial services, where AI agents can coordinate, transact, and settle value across complex real-world scenarios. 

AEON's founding team brings deep experience from Binance, Chainlink, Google, HSBC, and GrabPay, combining with deep expertise in AI, blockchain architecture, and real-world payments. This blend allows AEON to build a settlement layer the way the agentic economy actually operates, scaling payments that are verifiable, trustless, and at machine speed.

"AEON is not just bridging AI and real-world commerce, we are building the settlement layer the agentic economy inherently requires," said Eddie Li, CEO and co-founder of AEON. "As production relations shift toward an economy powered by autonomous agents and value exchange between AIs, we believe a settlement layer built for the agentic economy will emerge and this economic paradigm needs its own financial foundation. This funding empowers us to accelerate that mission, advancing our settlement layer built for AI, and deepening collaboration with ecosystem partners like Coinbase and BNB Chain."

About AEON

AEON is the settlement layer built for the agentic economy, leveraging leading protocols to enable autonomous, verifiable AI agent transactions at scale. It bridges Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interactions with real-world settlement and continuous value flows.

Serving more than 2 million users and processing 30M monthly transactions, AEON is backed by YZi Labs and IDG Capital, with participation from investors including HashKey Capital, Stanford Blockchain Builders Fund, etc.

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About YZi Labs

YZi Labs manages over $10 billion in assets globally. Our investment philosophy emphasizes impact first—we believe that meaningful returns will naturally follow. We invest in ventures at every stage, prioritizing those with solid fundamentals in Web3, AI, and biotech.

YZi Labs' portfolio covers over 300 projects from over 25 countries across six continents. Some notable portfolios include Trustwallet, CoinMarketCap, Polygon, Injective, Ethena, Safepal Wallet, Better Payment Network, Aster, XAI (acquired by SpaceX), and more. More than 65 of YZi Labs' portfolio companies have gone through our incubation program, EASY Residency. For more information, follow YZi Labs on X. 

SOURCE AEON