Axal, a blockchain company developing a network of autonomous agents, announced today it has raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding led by CMT Digital.

The funding round also saw participation from a16z Crypto Startup School, Escape Velocity, IDG Vietnam, Artichoke Capital, Trident Digital, Blockchain Builders Fund, Blockhunters Group, Echo and the Mentat Group.

Axal is building a network of autonomous agents that can execute user requests of predefined actions using blockchain technology. As much of the blockchain industry is focused around decentralized finance, which involves moving tokens and currency, many agents manage monetary products.

For example, a user could prompt an agent with a request such as “Every time I receive tokens that are not stablecoins, swap them to USDC tokens within 5 minutes.” Critically, the user doesn’t have to tell the agent the steps it needs to take in order to execute the desired outcome, just the request. The agent generalizes the request into a the multistep process and then proceeds to complete it on its own.

To make this work, Axal has built an ecosystem of artificial intelligence solvers to execute user intents based on requests. Each solver in the system bids to attempt to execute the request, or request step, and if it can show that it can do it, it gets to run it and that action is stamped on the blockchain as a transaction. That way, Axal can verify that each agent is acting properly.

“Imagine a world where you can state a request, no matter how complex or time-consuming, and an agent immediately fulfills it with guarantees they did it correctly,” said Axal founder Ash Ahmed. “This is a magical yet totally possible future when one combines the abstraction power of intents, the trust guarantees of blockchains, and competitive markets of agents, AI or human. Axal is building for this future.”

Using Axal’s network, the company is launching its first product, Autopilot, a trading platform powered by autonomous agents. Automated trading bots have long existed in the cryptocurrency trading industry, but most of them are built on simple logic that perform trades based on thresholds and pre-programmed rules.

Autopilot starts by having users answer risk assessment questions to help them allocate categories around what tokens to trade and what percentages to set using the automated agents. Anyone who holds crypto tokens can quickly build a strategy and does not need to worry about tracking prices. The agents handle trades, swaps and yield management automatically.

Axal said it will use the new funding to expand its team and build on its core architecture behind the autonomous agent creation, coordination and verification system.

Image: Shutterstock/Dilok Klaisataporn