New York-based Donut Labs has raised $7 million in a pre-seed funding spherical to construct what it claims is the world’s first “agentic” crypto browser — a device designed to assist customers work together with blockchain-based functions utilizing synthetic intelligence.
The spherical was led by Sequoia, Bitkraft and HackVC, with participation from angel buyers together with Solana and different ecosystem leaders, equivalent to Matrix Companions, Sky9 Ventures, Makers Fund and SonicSVM.
The $7 million will help the event of Donut, an executable crypto browser powered by synthetic intelligence brokers, with a local cryptocurrency pockets and decentralized change integration, decentralized community entry and onchain execution.
Not like conventional net browsers, Donut’s AI algorithms perceive web page context and person intent, serving to it autonomously execute blockchain-based operations.
“The standard browser hasn’t modified for greater than 30 years. We’re re-architecting the whole lot,” stated Donut founder and CEO Chris Zhu. “We’re reconstructing the entrance finish of the web to be hyper-financialized for AI brokers.”
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Donut’s customers will achieve entry to an array of decentralized instruments and crypto companies beneath a single agentic interface, which might make digital asset transactions safer.
“Architecturally remoted signing environments and AI-powered danger screening safe each transaction whereas optimizing execution for pace and price,” stated Zhu, including that “AI interprets opaque calldata into plain English and assigns security grades.”
Donut’s AI brokers can commerce or swap tokens, place bets, or earn passive yield on digital belongings.
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Agentic browsers might reshape web in subsequent decade
Whereas Donut’s earliest adopters will seemingly be crypto merchants, builders or decentralized finance (DeFi) customers, agentic browsers could explode into the mainstream throughout the subsequent decade.
Throughout the subsequent 5 years, Ethereum layer-2 (L2) networks will use agentic browsers to chop settlement prices. Mainstream browsers will even combine agentic capabilities or construct interoperability with purpose-built agentic browsers as AI turns into cheaper, in keeping with Zhu.
Nonetheless, essentially the most vital adoption will come throughout the subsequent decade when onchain and offchain environments might be utterly merged for web customers, Zhu stated, including:
“Agentic browsers are poised to turn into the default entry level — very like smartphones changed function telephones.”
In the long run, Donut goals to help funds, gaming, content material creation and social interplay, all inside a single crypto-native browser. The corporate additionally plans to leverage developments in decentralized id and confidential computing to show the browser into a private “crypto CFO” for retail customers.
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