Chi Zhang
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Kite (Datalego Inc.)
Zhang argues that AI agents need their own verified identity, programmable permissions and settlement before they can transact on a user's behalf, because payment and identity systems built for humans are too rigid for agents operating at machine speed.
Why the room needs them.
Chi Zhang is co-founder and CEO of Kite, which builds identity and payment infrastructure for autonomous AI agents. She spoke at Proof of Talk Paris 2026 on a Taostats Stage panel on personhood, provenance and verification in the agentic age.
The full account.
Chi Zhang is co-founder and chief executive of Kite, a company building identity and payment infrastructure for autonomous AI agents. The terms of service on its website, gokite.ai, name the operator as Datalego Inc. Zhang holds a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, which Fortune described as being in statistics. According to Kite's September 2025 funding announcement and to General Catalyst, one of its investors, she led core data products at Databricks before co-founding the company with Scott Shi.
The company was formerly known as Zettablock. In November 2024 the ZettaBlock team launched Kite AI, which it described as a blockchain foundation layer for open access to AI data, models and agents. In September 2025 Kite announced an 18 million dollar Series A led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst, bringing its total funding to 33 million dollars. The same announcement described Kite Agent Identity Resolution, or Kite AIR, made up of Agent Passport, a verifiable identity for agents with operational guardrails, and an Agent App Store where agents pay to access APIs, data and commerce tools, then live through integrations with Shopify and PayPal. On 30 April 2026 Kite moved from testnet to production, launching Kite Chain, a settlement layer for payments in digital dollars, and Kite Agent Passport, a programmable wallet that lets an AI agent hold funds and make purchases while the user sets spending limits and authorised destinations. The company said at that point that it had raised 35 million dollars and that pilot integrations with PayPal and Shopify were under way.
Zhang spoke at Proof of Talk Paris 2026, held on 2–3 June 2026 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in the Louvre Palace, as Co-Founder and CEO of Kite. On Day 2, 3 June, she was a panellist on the Taostats Stage in "Personhood, Provenance, and Verification in the Agentic Age", a session on proof of personhood, the provenance of content and actions, and the verification of identity and authorisation for AI agents. She shared the panel with Pierre Aubert, Evin McMullen and Stuart Haber, and Mohamed Ezeldin moderated. Kite later published the recording on its own YouTube channel.
In an interview with Fortune in September 2025, Zhang said that shopping would increasingly be automated inside AI assistants rather than done on retailer websites, and described the agentic era as being at its very beginning.
What Chi believes about the next ten years.
Years of shipping.
Lines that keep proving correct.
“The normal way for us to do shopping at the moment is we go to the Amazon website or Shopify store and shop across the store, find the products. But in the future, it's all going to be automated. So we won't need to leave, let's say, Perplexity, or ChatGPT.”
“I'm very excited about the future, rather than worried about competition at the moment, because it's just at the very beginning of the of the agentic era.”
“Today's human-centric systems are too rigid and brittle for swarms of agents conducting micro-transactions at machine speed. Kite AIR solves that.”
What they have built, written, and backed.
Built
- Kite Chain and Kite Agent PassportLaunched 30 April 2026 as Kite's move from testnet to production: a settlement layer for payments in digital dollars and a programmable wallet that lets an AI agent hold funds and buy on a user's behalf within spending limits and destinations the user sets. Pilot integrations with PayPal and Shopify were under way at launch.
- Kite AIR (Agent Identity Resolution)Described in Kite's September 2025 announcement as comprising Agent Passport, a verifiable agent identity with operational guardrails, and an Agent App Store where agents discover and pay for APIs, data and commerce tools, then live through integrations with Shopify and PayPal.
- Kite AI, from ZettaBlockLaunched on 11 November 2024 by the ZettaBlock team Zhang co-founded, as a blockchain foundation layer for access to AI data, models and agents; the company later traded as Kite.
The next Proof of Talk is in Abu Dhabi.
Louvre Abu Dhabi, 3–4 December 2026. Admission is by application, and the room is capped at 2,000.
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