Ripple Backs $5M Funding Round for AI-Driven 'Automated Economy'
Ripple has participated in a $5 million funding round for startups focused on building an "automated economy." The investment initiative targets companies that use machine learning for automated trading and DeFi risk management. The move highlights the growing convergence of digital payments infrastructure, AI, and on-chain financial automation.
The $5 million seed round for AI infrastructure startup t54 Labs was co-led by Anagram, PL Capital, and the notable TradFi giant Franklin Templeton, signaling deepening ties between crypto-native and traditional asset managers. Other participants in the round included Blockchain Coinvestors, Virtuals Ventures, and ABCDE. Founded in January 2025 by Chandler Fang, the San Francisco-based t54 Labs is a 12-person team focused on building a "trust layer" for the agentic economy. Their core product is a "Know Your Agent" (KYA) framework, designed to verify the identity and manage the risk of autonomous AI agents executing financial transactions. The infrastructure is chain-agnostic, already integrated with the XRP Ledger, Solana, and Base. This allows AI agents to interact with financial markets and make machine-to-machine payments for services like API calls or compute resources, a foundational step for an automated economy. One of the first major use cases comes from Evernorth, a Ripple-backed digital asset treasury firm. Evernorth plans to use t54's technology for the autonomous treasury management and AI-driven rebalancing of more than $1 billion in institutional XRP holdings. This investment highlights a strategic push by Ripple into the "agentic economy," a landscape where autonomous AI systems are projected to handle a significant portion of enterprise workflows. According to Ripple President Monica Long, as these agents begin to manage real capital, trust infrastructure becomes a critical and foundational component.
