Nava raises $8.3 million in seed funding to keep AI financial agents from going off the rails

Nava founders Brianna Montgomery and Vyas Krishnan pose for a photo (Credit: Courtesy of Nava)

The crypto world has been buzzing in recent months about the potential for applying blockchain technology to agentic commerce, a term that describes AI agents undertaking purchases or other economic activity on a user’s behalf. Early innovations include Coinbase’s x402, a standard for AI agents to transact across the web, and Stripe-backed Tempo’s Machine Payments Protocol.

But for this futuristic technology to actually catch on, humans will need to trust AI agents not to go rogue with their hard-earned money. That’s the goal of a startup named Nava, which has raised $8.3 million in seed funding to build the trust side of the autonomous payments equation. The funding round was co-led by venture capital firms Polychain and Archetype.