Working with AI agents is like working with contractors. 

You don’t know them too well, they need a lot of context, and their output quality varies a lot.

So to set them up for success, and protect yourself, you keep your requests specific and their access limited. You don’t bring on a contractor for design work and then give them your books, your passwords, and a company credit card. But that’s the line we’re flirting with when it comes to agents.

As AI continues to work its way into every corner of the internet, it’s critical that we build safeguards and controls into the agents we’re entrusting with our money and our digital lives. But we need to ensure we’re counterbalancing them without nerfing the emergent properties that make them so powerful. And blockchains offer a perfect setting to do just that.

Combining the strengths of AI and crypto, Nava is building a platform that brings much needed predictability, safety, and intent-to-settlement accountability to AI. Instead of constricting an agent’s abilities, Nava introduces a set of powerful controls, enabling users to define specific boundaries around execution, set up guardrails and backstops, and verify the lifecycle of their agents’ actions every step of the way.

Through addressing the fundamental tension between AI’s creativity and the accountability required by institutions, Nava immediately unlocks new opportunities for AI. Today, that means enhancements across DeFi and institutional trading, such as enabling funds to deploy agents to execute transactions at scale within defined parameters, or allowing onchain protocols to automate treasury management. Tomorrow, that looks like agent-enhanced workflows improving everything from back office operations to critical supply chain management.

Nava’s Founder and CEO, Vyas Krishnan, was the first employee and Product Lead at Eigen Labs, where he spent several years working on how to keep machines accountable—invaluable experience that he is now bringing to the world of AI.

Alongside Vyas are Co-founder and COO, Brianna Montgomery, as well as Research Lead, Ding Zhao. Brianna was formerly Head of Strategy and VP of Growth at Eigen Labs/EigenFoundation, and will be driving initiatives to build two-sided markets and expand Nava’s technology to an institutional scale.

Ding is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and leads the school’s Safe AI Laboratory, focused on building trustworthy, verifiable, human-centric AI systems, and pioneering advances in AI robustness, safety, explainability, and verification. 

Together, the Nava team is bringing a wealth of blockchain and AI expertise to the agent puzzle, developing Nava as an open, full-stack, AI-native platform built atop crypto rails.

As we’ve written about extensively, the chaotic, open environments of blockchains and their near-infinite assets, markets, and scenario diversity can drive rapid feedback loops to level up onchain agents far more efficiently than the unimaginative enterprise contexts they’re often trapped in. 

This synergy between AI and blockchain is powerful. And as agents continue to flood blockchains and the wider internet, Nava will play a critical role in making AI more trustworthy, blockchains more powerful, and the entire agentic economy far more valuable.

‍We’re incredibly excited to co-lead Nava’s $8.3M Seed round as they transform agents from unpredictable intermediaries into trustworthy collaborators!

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Nava: https://navalabs.ai/ 

Nava on X: https://x.com/navaai 

Vyas Krishnan: https://x.com/vyas_krishnan 

Brianna Montgomery: https://x.com/zkBri 

Ding Zhao: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ding-zhao-01130730/