THEA raises $8 million to build Solana AI settlement layer with ZK proofs

THEA raised $8 million to build a trust-minimized settlement layer for AI services on Solana, using zero-knowledge proofs for verification.

"AI agents and services need programmable infrastructure to coordinate, pay and settle across distributed applications, and THEA is building those rails," Valentin Batura, CEO of THEA, said.

The company processes more than 400 million AI inference queries each month and serves over 3,000 enterprise customers across 30 jurisdictions. Thea Network will use a partitioned off-chain compute network anchored to Solana with zero-knowledge proofs, enabling parallel processing of independent requests without running compute directly inside smart contracts.

The funding signals continued capital deployment into AI x Crypto infrastructure on Solana, with Maven11 Capital, Spartan Group, Manifold Trading, Fisher8 Capital and Hack VC backing the thesis that machine-to-machine payments will require programmable settlement rails. Several angel investors also participated, including figures associated with Galois Capital.

THEA, founded in 2024 and headquartered in the Cayman Islands, has trained its predictive behavioral AI models on data from more than 35 billion real-world decisions. The company said clients using its AI solutions have seen customer retention improve by as much as 30 percent.

Thea Network is designed as a federated settlement system that coordinates access across intelligent applications, connecting purpose-built AI models, humans and AI agents through programmable payment and coordination rails. The network routes inference requests and settles transactions on Solana while keeping heavy data processing off-chain, combining blockchain-level integrity with performance closer to cloud infrastructure.

THEA said it does not currently have a token and has not announced an initial coin offering or public sale. The company indicated plans for a utility token to tokenize access to its autonomous systems, enabling payments and global scalability across its network.

The funding round comes as crypto investors increasingly focus on infrastructure for AI agents, autonomous payments and verifiable compute. For THEA, the immediate task is to turn that demand into usable rails for AI services that need to transact, settle and coordinate at scale.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.