Stephan Apel

Founding Partner & Board Member @OVioHQ #blockchain #crypto. Personal views and not advice.

[Unicity @unicity_labs]

Join @mgault and @JoshuaJBouw tomorrow for our next spaces on the AI Agent operating system we are building to run on Unicity

Hit the reminder icon to tune in live or for the recording
https://t.co/8VsHyYoBiP

[Unicity @unicity_labs]

Unicity Labs Raises $3M to Scale Autonomous Agentic Marketplaces

Seed round led by blockchain VC firm Blockchange Ventures. The Unicity Protocol enables AI agents to form peer-to-peer trustless marketplaces at machine speed

ZUG, SWITZERLAND - February 17th, 2026 - Unicity Labs, a protocol development company building the agentic autonomous internet, has successfully raised $3 million in seed funding. The round was led by Blockchange Ventures (@blockchangevc), with participation from Tawasal (@TawasalSuperApp), a Middle East-based communications super app, and Outlier Ventures (@oviohq), a leading Web3 early-stage investor.

The timely raise comes as AI agents (software entities that can independently discover services, negotiate terms, and execute transactions) evolve from conceptual tools into economic actors. The global agentic AI market is projected to exceed $100 billion by 2032. In line with this, Unicity Labs has developed the Unicity Protocol, a peer-to-peer cryptographic architecture enabling autonomous AI agents to discover services, verify counterparties, and transact at machine speed without intermediaries or shared ledgers.

The Unicity Labs team, which previously built and exited 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 governance, grant funding, and open-source development.

As AI agents become increasingly autonomous, they will need to discover services, negotiate terms, and settle transactions continuously, at scale, without human intervention. Today's infrastructure forces a trade-off: centralize through big tech, sacrificing trustlessness, or rely on traditional blockchains, which bottleneck when millions of agents transact simultaneously.

"Satoshi's whitepaper was titled 'Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash.' Seventeen years later, we still don't have true peer-to-peer or electronic cash. Every transaction still routes through shared ledgers, introducing unnecessary bottlenecks," said Mike Gault (@mgault), CEO of Unicity Labs. “Unicity changes that. We’re not building another marketplace or trading platform. We’re building the infrastructure beneath them. Unicity provides the place and the rails that allow agents to discover each other and settle directly, frictionlessly, peer-to-peer, at the scale and speed the agentic economy demands.”

"The shared-ledger model that defined the last decade was designed before the AI-driven world we are now entering," said Matt Immerso, General Partner at Blockchange Ventures. "Unicity didn't just patch the old system, they built its successor thanks to their critical innovation that separates transactions from validations. By having the network simply confirm an asset’s uniqueness rather than processing its entire context, Unicity delivered the breakthroughs in speed, scale, and cost that are absolute prerequisites for a future powered by autonomous agents."

Tawasal, a leading communications super app in the Middle East serving over five million users, participated in the round as a strategic investor.

"Today, merchants spend enormous amounts acquiring customers - buying ads, competing for attention, hoping for conversions," said Eric Leandri, CEO of Tawasal. "In an agentic economy, merchants don't market to people. They sell to agents - agents that have been instructed about what their users want and are ready to transact. Unicity's infrastructure makes that possible, and it will fundamentally change the economics of commerce."

"The industry has spent a decade optimizing shared ledgers. Unicity asked a different question entirely: what if agents don't need a shared ledger at all?" said Dimitrios Chatzianagnostou (@ChatziDimi), CIO of Outlier Ventures. "That architectural shift is what makes massive scale agent-to-agent commerce possible.”

[Mike Gault @mgault]

THREAD
1/ The Internet is being rebuilt for AI agents.
Agentic Commerce is projected to hit $3T by 2030.
But we're still in the dialup era of this new Internet.
Here's what's broken - and how we're fixing it 🧵

[Santeri Aramo @SanteriAramo]

@OVioHQ Did you ever predict $AUKI would end up on this path? Do you remember the first pitch that Auki gave you when you helped us accelerate?

[Outlier Ventures @oviohq]

Accelerating the development of tokenized RWAs onchain.
👏

[cheqd.io 🆔 @cheqd_io]

👑We’re excited to announce that cheqd is partnering with the @ASI_Alliance, a collaboration between @Fetch_ai, @SingularityNET, @oceanprotocol, and @CUDOS to bring verifiable trust and identity to AI agent ecosystems.

📗Learn more: https://t.co/5luAmY2GrG

[Outlier Ventures @oviohq]

We’re proud to announce the second partnership with Morgan Creek Digital @DigitalCurrents — this time focused on the MENA region through our Post Web Base Camp accelerator program.

This marks the start of a deeper collaboration in the Middle East. Morgan Creek has deployed $400M+ across AI, Blockchain, Infra & Big Data — now, we’re combining forces to back the next wave of OpenFi, RWA, and Infra builders.

🌍 MENA founders, let’s build the future together.

If you’re building in OpenFi, Infrastructure, RWA or AI, we want to hear from you. Read on what this partnership means for the MENA region.

[Auki @Auki]

“We’ve spent decades entering digital worlds. Now they’re entering ours.”

At @ARealityEvent 2025, @broodsugar shared The Great Reversal and how spatial computing is making physical space accessible to AI.

Retail. Robotics. AI Accessibility.
This is the future of embodied intelligence.

🎥 Watch here: https://t.co/MfEJIx0tUf

[Outlier Ventures @oviohq]

🚨 Demo Day Alert
We’re beyond Web3. This is the age of agents, autonomy, and on-chain intelligence.

On June 25, meet the startups building the next internet, live at Post Web Demo Day, in partnership with @LifeXvc 👇

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 @Openformat_tech - The community co-pilot for coordinating, understanding and rewarding your web3 community
🧠 @datainetwork - A web3 data layer powering on-chain AI
🎭 @aliasapp_ - A next-gen ecosystem guiding IP, entertainment, creators, and content into the era of interactive 3D AI agents
💱 Fiet Protocol @usher_web3 - Fiet Protocol delivers decentralised fiat-to-stablecoin exchange with OTC-matching or lower fees and passive yield
🌀 @duffleinc - Intent-based Abstraction Layer that allows users to swap tokens across any chain without gas fees and/or manual signature approvals
🏀 @LootMogul - Pioneering Trust in the AI Economy with Licensed AI Personas—The "Blue Checkmark" for the AI Economy
💳 @nettyworthapp- AI-loan Infrastructure unlocking liquidity from Digital and Real-World Assets with AI-Agents & DeFi Credit Scores
⭕ Unicity - Whether you're an investor, builder, or protocol partner, this is your chance to engage directly with the people shaping the next wave of Web3.

If you’re scouting alpha, investing in what's next, or building alongside it...— this is for you.

[Outlier Ventures @oviohq]

Everyone’s talking about AI agents.
But no one’s talking about what really makes them work.

Not intelligence. Not LLMs. Not agent frameworks.

It may be something more...

Find out what is the quiet infrastructure powering the machine economy 👇

[Auki @Auki]

"Contextual awareness with spatial awareness will unlock physical AI which will be the greatest advancement that we'll see in the next 100 years."
- $AUKI co-founder @SanteriAramo at DePIN Day Dubai 🇦🇪

Thanks to @fluence_project for hosting!

[Stephan Apel @StephanApel]

@galaxyhq Glitter

[Outlier Ventures @oviohq]

Most accelerators talk about support. We talk in outcomes.

👀 370+ portfolio companies
💵 $1B+ raised by Outlier graduates

🧵👇

[Outlier Ventures @oviohq]

Like this post if you're in Dubai ☀️🇦🇪

Meet our CCO @mattyboomboom at @token2049.

What side events would you like to see us at this week?

[Lumerin Protocol @HelloLumerin]

Global, Permissionless, Instant

The hashrate marketplace is open 24/7.

No middlemen. No gatekeepers.

Buy and sell computing power like you’d trade any other digital asset: fast, transparent, decentralized.

Try it now: https://t.co/3x10RIT2xt

[Auki @Auki]

Making the world accessible to AI is the highest leverage thing we can do as a civilization—way bigger than web3.

But what does it take? Auki founder @SanteriAramo breaks down how we're doing it with @peaq, @geodnet, and @mawariXR.

Wanna contribute? Join @Intercognitive.

[Outlier Ventures @oviohq]

If you're building in web3, we want to know - our next cohort is coming soon.

Engage with this post if you need a follow 👋

[Outlier Ventures @oviohq]

https://t.co/uyFNwF5eYz

[Outlier Ventures @oviohq]

1/6 🎬 Behind the scenes of our FutureSpark Base Camp in Riyadh 🇸🇦

In partnership with @ntdpsa and supported by @NEOM, we brought together some of the most promising Web3 startups to pitch in front of top investors, VCs, and key industry leaders. 🇸🇦✨

Watch the full recap 🎥👇

[Outlier Ventures @oviohq]

1/2 🌐 The internet is breaking apart.

The platforms, feeds, and attention loops that defined the last 20 years? Unraveling.

At @EthereumDenver, we pulled back the curtain on The Post Web, the next phase of the internet:

↳ AI agents will transact, negotiate, and build — on our behalf.

↳ The web will dissolve into a network of autonomous, self-evolving systems.

↳ The balance of power will shift — from corporations to code.

Builders who don’t adapt won’t just be disrupted. They’ll be obsolete. The great reset has begun. Watch the recap.

@jamie247 @rumimorales @eunika_sot @mattyboomboom @ChatziDimi @Pietroo_Negri @GlasswalkerPFFT (@YOM_Official) @surshar_ @blessbutian (@theblessnetwork) @heychristopher (@1kxnetwork) @mateo_ventures (@gaianet_ai) @JuanDMendieta (@keyrock) @hananyss (@virtuals_io) @BigsbysFolly