Exclusive: a16z CSX Supports Cambrian in Developing AI Agents for Crypto Finance

Cambrian, a startup focused on building infrastructure for AI agents with financial intelligence, has secured $5.9 million in a seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z) Crypto Startup Accelerator (CSX). The company is now part of the fourth cohort (CSX 04) of the accelerator program in San Francisco, with plans to launch its testnet and mainnet later this year. In addition to a16z’s backing, Cambrian also received funding from Blockchain Builders and various angel investors.

The main goal of Cambrian is to empower AI agents and autonomous financial bots with high-quality, verifiable on-chain and off-chain data to enable smarter, risk-aware decision-making in real-time. By aggregating data from various sources, including blockchain activity, market pricing, and social sentiment, Cambrian offers a consensus mechanism to validate this information, ensuring that the data used by these agents is accurate and reliable.

Cambrian was founded by Sam Green, a former co-founder of Semiotic Labs and a core contributor to The Graph, where he played a crucial role in securing a $60 million grant and building infrastructure that facilitated over $80 billion in trading volume. Green’s academic credentials include a Ph.D. in reinforcement learning, as well as experience at a U.S. Department of Energy research lab. He believes that the future of crypto will involve autonomous financial agents, and Cambrian is positioning itself as a key player in providing financial intelligence for these agents’ high-consequence tasks.

Cambrian’s first major use case is Deep42, an autonomous agent delivering DeFi insights on Twitter (@DeepFortyTwo), which serves as a demonstration of the platform’s capabilities. The company has already formed partnerships with strategic players such as EigenLayer, Virtuals, and Eliza Labs, who are working with Cambrian to develop applications in the emerging field of agentic finance.

EigenLayer, in particular, will play an important role by providing a verifiable runtime for the agents operating on Cambrian’s network. Nader Dabit, Director of Developer Relations at Eigen Labs, expressed excitement about Cambrian being launched on EigenLayer, stating that the project will serve as a crucial sensory layer for the next wave of agentic finance, ensuring that agents have access to data with strong performance and security guarantees.

Looking ahead, Cambrian aims to lay the foundational intelligence layer for AI agents operating within the decentralized economy. The company envisions a future where AI, humans, and nature coexist and thrive in harmony, with agentic finance representing a key first step toward realizing that vision.