Tether Drops Cash on Agents That Can Actually Pay Their Own Bills 🤖💸

Stablecoin issuer Tether has joined a seed extension round for AIsa as a strategic investor, alongside HIVEN, the companies said Friday. The raise pushes total funding for the San Francisco-based enterprise AI startup past $9 million and adds Tether and HIVEN to a roster of backers that already includes Alibaba, Tribe Capital, Sumitomo Corporation, Draper Associates and Saison Capital.

AIsa is building what it calls the Trusted Resource and Transaction Network for Enterprise AI Agents, infrastructure designed to let corporate AI agents discover external data, AI search, models, APIs, software tools and industry services while metering usage, billing customers and settling payments under enterprise-defined permissions. The company said the network addresses a market problem of fragmented providers, integrations and billing systems that prevent AI agents from running reliably in production at scale.

"Enterprise AI agents need trusted information, useful tools and a governed way to transact," AIsa founder and CEO Jordan Liu said in the statement. "Our vision is to build the infrastructure that enables agents to discover, access and pay for resources globally, while giving enterprises full control over permissions, spending and transactions. We are excited to welcome Tether and HIVEN as strategic investors as we accelerate the transition from AI assistants to autonomous, production-ready agents."

The investment comes as Tether continues to generate sizable operating profit from its US Treasury portfolio. Cointelegraph reported on July 31 that the company posted $1.5 billion in net operating profit for the second quarter, driven primarily by interest income on US Treasury holdings and repurchase agreements backed by government securities.

Tether has framed strategic investments such as the one in AIsa as part of a broader push into payments, artificial intelligence and related infrastructure, though the company has not tied the AIsa funding directly to specific stablecoin products. AIsa has similarly not disclosed whether settlement on its network will use $USDT or another payment rail. Investors and enterprise customers will be watching how the two parties translate the announced partnership into deployed products, given the early stage of both the funding round and AIsa's commercial rollout.