New York-based Donut Labs, which is building a so-called agentic browser that can execute cryptocurrency trades, has closed a $7 million pre-seed round led by China’s HongShan Capital Group, formerly known as Sequoia CN, BitKraft and HackVC. Other investors included Sky9 Ventures, Matrix Partners, which has an office in Boston, Makers Fund, Altos, Orthogonal Ventures, Vessel Ventures and SonicSVM.

Donut founder and CEO Chris Zhu is an alumnus of New York University’s Stern School of Business, where he earned a bachelor’s degree. He has served as product strategy manager at ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, and also founded SonicSVM. Zhu’s team includes former Meta AI researcher Tim Fan and other experts from Tencent, Primodium and Sahara, and Prof. Xi Chen of New York University’s Stern School.

Donut Labs aims to reconstruct “the front-end of the internet to be hyper-financialized” for AI agents, Zhu said. “The traditional browser has not changed for 30 + years, and we get to rearchitect everything,” he added.

Traditional browsers separate information retrieval from financial actions but Donut merges them, the company said. “Incorporating a range of decentralized tools into a single agentic interface, Donut provides a comprehensive front-end for accessing an array of crypto services,” Donut Labs said, adding that its browser would enable users to follow the latest tokens, instantly trade, place bets, execute trades, and earn yield — all without leaving a single page.

“Our vision is for crypto executions to be completed by agents. In order to do that, we are building the best in-domain model and a swarm of browser agents across complex environments. Our browser and extensions will be where the agents live,” said Fan, Donut Lab’s chief scientist. Fan is a former Carnegie Mellon University researcher.

Donut’s browser uses the CodeAct framework, which leverages executable Python code to enable agents based on large language models. It also uses a MCP client — a component of an AI application such as a chatbot that helps connect to external tools and data sources — and a so-called “headless browser” — or one without a graphical user interface. The Donut browser is expected to drive a variety of cryptocurrency transactions. To further support crypto users, the company will also host a wallet, a network and a decentralized exchange in a single agentic interface.

The post Donut Labs Raises $7M to Build Agentic ‘Crypto Browser’ appeared first on citybiz.

This contant was orignally distributed by citybiz. Blockchain Registration, Verification & Enhancement provided by NewsRamp™. The source URL for this press release is Donut Labs Raises $7M to Build Agentic ‘Crypto Browser’.