Ripple and Franklin Templeton Back t54 Labs’ $5M Bet on Agentic Finance

t54 Labs, a San Francisco startup, is trying to create a trust layer for AI agents that are going to move real money on behalf of people and businesses. 

The idea is that there is a mechanism that verifies the agent, monitors it, and holds it accountable when things go wrong. Right now, there isn’t a standard system for that.

The company just raised US$5 million (AU$7.02 million) in seed funding. The round was co-led by Anagram, PL Capital, and Franklin Templeton, with participation from Ripple and several crypto-focused funds. 

Founder Chandler Fang didn’t share the valuation, timeline, or deal structure, and no investors took board seats, which keeps control with the team — for now.

Read more: Chainlink Legal Veteran Takes the Helm of SEC’s Crypto Task Force

A Trust Layer For AI Agents

How this trust layer works is very simple. For instance, a business routes an agent’s payments through t54, which verifies the agent’s identity (so it’s not an unknown bot), sets rules around what it’s allowed to do, and runs live risk checks on each transaction. 

If something looks suspicious, it can flag or block the payment before funds move. It also keeps an auditable record of what the agent did and why, often using blockchain rails for settlement and traceability.

So the product is basically an encompass of ID, transaction guardrails, monitoring, and audit trail for autonomous payments.

Also, blockchain is used as an audit-friendly settlement layer, and the system can run across different payment rails and is already live on XRP Ledger (XRPL), Solana (SOL), and Base. It also released x402-secure, an open-source security layer for the x402 agent payment protocol.

Read more: Vitalik Buterin Sells Over $6M in ETH as Holdings Dip Below 225,000