AEON Raises $8 Million to Build Settlement Layer for AI Economy

AEON AI has raised $8 million in a pre-seed funding round led by YZi Labs, with participation from investors including IDG Capital, HashKey Capital, Stanford Blockchain Builders Fund, Oak Grove Ventures, and others, announced in a press release.

The funding will support AEON’s development of a settlement layer for what it calls the agentic economy, enabling AI agents to perform verifiable on-chain transactions and connect to more than 50 million merchants globally. AEON’s infrastructure integrates protocols such as x402, ERC-8004, Google AP2, and MCP to allow autonomous payment execution and settlement between AI agents and real-world merchants.

AEON recently launched the x402 Facilitator built on BNB Chain, which provides verifiable transactions, on-chain settlement, and immutable receipts for service providers within the BNB ecosystem. The company’s architecture includes a distributed Trust Hub for transaction verification and a Physical Gateway enabling agent-to-merchant payments.

The company serves over two million users and processes about 30 million monthly transactions. Its roadmap focuses on expanding from payment verification to execution verification while extending its settlement network across emerging markets and traditional financial systems.