After operating in stealth with almost no public footprint, AIUSD has stepped into the open with metrics most startups dream about years after launch: $1 trillion in annualized trading volume and a fully functional AI system capable of moving, routing, and trading assets across the entire crypto and stablecoin landscape. AIUSD’s nearly eight-figure pre-seed round marked an early milestone, and the company says it is now seeing strong inbound interest as it prepares to close its seed round.
The company has positioned itself as the creator of Agentic Money, a new category of AI-native financial infrastructure that allows both humans and AI agents to manage assets simply by issuing natural language instructions. Rather than navigating fragmented chains, incompatible exchanges, or clunky brokerage APIs, the company says AIUSD users interact with a single intelligent system that handles everything behind the scenes.
“We’re building an AI-first financial layer on top of a highly fragmented system,” said Bill Sun, co-founder of AIUSD and a former DeepMind researcher and Millenium WorldQuant portfolio manager. “Cross-chain execution and routing should be as simple as a function call — and now they are.”
One AI Layer for All Assets
At the heart of AIUSD is an AI engine that treats the entire blockchain ecosystem as one unified liquidity environment. Whether assets sit on Ethereum, Solana, Binance Smart Chain, centralized exchanges, or tokenized brokerage platforms, the system can execute sophisticated strategies autonomously.
According to co-founder Yao Meng, a well-known algorithmic trading pioneer, the vision is simple: “Users and AI agents should have one balance that works everywhere. That’s what native interoperability really means.”
In stealth, AIUSD’s yield and execution platform ran algorithmic trading strategies with zero monthly drawdowns for 2.5 years, with $1 trillion in annualized transaction volume.
Money Built for AI, Backed by Top AI and Crypto Investors
As AI agents proliferate, AIUSD believes the financial system must evolve alongside them. The company is betting that the next era of global commerce will be powered not by humans typing into trading terminals, but by autonomous AI executing millions of micro-decisions per second.
AIUSD’s nearly eight-figure pre-seed financing round was just the beginning, as the company reports very strong inbound interest ahead of closing its seed round. Early investors in AIUSD include investors who backed Anthropic, Perplexity, TradingView, Sequoia US Scout Fund, a16z Scout Fund, Tesla FSD AI leadership, and category-defining founders such as William Freiberg (Crux), Tim Shi (Cresta AI), and Brad Bao (Lime). Two multibillion-dollar private equity funds also participated.
“AI agents are about to become major economic actors, and they need financial infrastructure built for how they operate,” said William Freiberg, co-founder of Crux and an early investor in AIUSD. “What impressed us is that AIUSD isn’t another trading tool — it’s a foundational layer that makes global execution and settlement callable by both humans and machines.”
Founded by Veterans of AI Research and Crypto Markets
AIUSD was founded by Yao Meng and Bill Sun, two figures with long and respected track records across crypto trading and artificial intelligence research.
Meng entered the crypto sector in 2011 while still in college, initially through mining before moving into early blockchain projects and exchange operations. Over the past decade he has survived in several of the industry’s major stress events — including the Mt. Gox bankruptcy process, the FTX collapse, and the recent 10/11 liquidation cycle — while running arbitrage, high-frequency trading, and quantitative strategies across major tokens and exchanges. He has managed large proprietary positions during periods of heavy market volatility, including at one point holding roughly one-fifth of all circulating Dogecoin as part of a delta-neutral strategy.
Sun, a mathematician with a Stanford PhD, previously worked at Google Brain (now DeepMind) during early research that preceded the formalization of “Transformer” architectures. Sun has held roles in quantitative finance at Citadel, Point72 Cubist, and Millennium’s WorldQuant, where he managed an equity quantitative portfolio of significant size. His academic work focuses on the mathematical foundations and structural behavior of deep-learning models, and he is co-advised by two distinguished leaders in the field: Stephen Boyd, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and head of BlackRock’s AI Lab, as well as David Donoho, a laureate of the Gauss, Wiener, and Shaw Prizes and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, previously research staff at Renaissance Technologies. In parallel, Sun contributed to cryptocurrency research spanning Bitcoin, smart-contract platforms, and early real-world-asset-backed stablecoin design. He also co-founded PIN AI, a decentralized protocol for personalized AI agent network and economy, where he is serving as chief scientist.
The pair say AIUSD draws on their combined experience across AI, crypto markets, and quantitative trading to build infrastructure they believe can support both human and machine-driven financial transactions.
AIUSD’s Long-Term Vision for an AI-Driven Financial System
AIUSD’s founders describe their product as the first step toward building what they call a financial operating system for both humans and autonomous AI agents. The company is developing interfaces ranging from consumer-facing conversational wallets to developer tools such as agent-compatible SDKs. Behind those interfaces, its roadmap includes a unified execution layer intended to manage account abstraction, cross-chain routing, best execution, and risk controls across different markets.
Over time, AIUSD plans to incorporate traditional assets, real-world assets, and tokenized equities into the same programmable account structure, with continuous settlement and built-in compliance. The founders say they expect financial activity to shift toward machine-to-machine transactions as AI models begin to pay for compute, data, and services without human input. In that scenario, AIUSD sees themselves as operating both as an intent-based financial interface for consumers and as a programmable settlement layer for autonomous systems.
Learn more at aiusd.ai.
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