PadUp Ventures, Unicity Labs Launch Agentic Commerce Program for Indian Startups

Zug/Gurugram: Switzerland-based blockchain infrastructure firm Unicity Labs has partnered with Indian accelerator PadUp Ventures to roll out a dedicated program aimed at building agentic commerce infrastructure in India.

The initiative will identify, mentor and fund startups developing AI agent-powered commerce applications on the Unicity Protocol positioning India as a potential hub for what both firms describe as the “autonomous economy.”

Short term: incubation and capital.
Long term: machine-speed commerce.

Building for AI-to-AI Transactions

The partnership is anchored in a central thesis: as AI agents increasingly act on behalf of businesses and consumers, they will require infrastructure purpose-built for autonomous discovery, negotiation and settlement.

Today’s digital rails, the companies argue, were designed for humans.

Conventional marketplaces rely on centralized trust. Traditional blockchains depend on shared ledgers that can create consensus bottlenecks. Neither, according to Unicity Labs, scales efficiently when millions of AI agents transact simultaneously.

The Unicity Protocol attempts to address that gap through a peer-to-peer blockchain architecture that eliminates the shared ledger model. It enables private negotiation and atomic settlement, with claims of throughput exceeding 300 million transactions per second, one-second finality and fixed micro-cent fees.

If realized at scale, that model would fundamentally alter how digital commerce infrastructure operates.

The Agentic AI Startup Program

Under the agreement, PadUp will introduce a dedicated “Agentic Commerce Track” within its PrepUp acceleration program. The track will focus specifically on startups building applications atop the Unicity Protocol.

Target use cases include:

• SMB sales automation
• Supply chain coordination
• Cross-border payments
• Autonomous procurement systems

Selected startups will gain access to structured mentoring, ecosystem-level go-to-market support and potential funding from both PadUp’s investor network and Unicity’s ecosystem fund.

The program also aims to facilitate enterprise adoption by jointly targeting Indian small and medium businesses (SMBs) and larger organisations seeking AI-enabled automation solutions.

Why India?

India’s startup ecosystem — now the world’s third-largest with over 112,000 recognised startups — presents a large testbed for agentic commerce infrastructure.

The country has approximately 63 million SMBs, many operating with limited operational bandwidth. According to PadUp Ventures, these businesses often lack the resources for full-scale sales teams or round-the-clock customer engagement.

AI agents could shift that equation.

“AI agents change the economics for SMBs,” said Pankaj Thakar, Partner at PadUp Ventures, noting that infrastructure readiness will determine how quickly those gains materialise.

India’s digital payments backbone also strengthens the case. The success of UPI demonstrated the country’s ability to adopt and scale real-time transaction systems rapidly. Cross-border trade corridors linking India to the UAE and Southeast Asia further enhance its attractiveness as a launch market for machine-driven commerce.

“India doesn’t just adopt technology — it scales it,” said Mike Gault, CEO of Unicity Labs.

Infrastructure for the Autonomous Economy

Unicity Labs positions itself as a protocol development company building infrastructure for the “agentic internet” a digital environment in which autonomous AI systems interact economically without continuous human oversight.

Unlike conventional blockchains that maintain shared ledgers visible to network participants, the Unicity Protocol uses peer-to-peer cryptographic objects to enable direct settlement between parties. The company argues that this architecture offers privacy and scalability advantages required for high-frequency AI-to-AI commerce.

Founded by blockchain and cryptography veterans, Unicity Labs previously raised $3 million in seed funding led by Blockchange Ventures, with participation from Outlier Ventures and Tawasal. The company is headquartered in Abu Dhabi, while the Unicity Foundation, based in Switzerland, oversees protocol development and governance.

PadUp Ventures, established in 2015 and headquartered in Gurugram, operates as a virtual accelerator providing structured mentoring and funding access for early-stage technology startups. It reports having supported over 350 tech companies across India and the UAE, collectively generating an estimated $200 million in stakeholder value.

Opportunity and Execution

The broader question facing agentic commerce is not conceptual but practical.

Can infrastructure support autonomous negotiation and settlement at meaningful scale?
Can governance models balance decentralisation with regulatory compliance?
And can startups convert technical capability into viable enterprise products?

The PadUp–Unicity collaboration seeks to address these questions by combining protocol-level innovation with local entrepreneurial execution.

If successful, the initiative could position Indian founders at the forefront of a new commerce paradigm one where AI systems discover suppliers, negotiate contracts and execute payments with minimal human intervention.

Ambitious? Certainly.

But in a market that has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to scale digital infrastructure at speed, the experiment may find fertile ground.