/C O R R E C T I O N - Unicity Labs/

Tech

/C O R R E C T I O N – Unicity Labs/

In the news release, PadUp Ventures and Unicity Labs Partner to Bring Agentic Commerce Infrastructure to India, issued Feb. 27, 2026 by Unicity Labs over PR Newswire, there was a typo in the original headline, as incorrectly transmitted by PR Newswire. The complete, corrected release follows:

PadUp Ventures and Unicity Labs Partner to Bring Agentic Commerce Infrastructure to India

Agentic AI startup program will enable Indian startups to build AI agent-powered commerce applications on the Unicity Protocol

, /PRNewswire/ — Unicity Labs, the company pioneering autonomous agentic marketplaces, and PadUp Ventures, one of Indias leading startup incubators, today announced a strategic partnership to accelerate the development of agentic commerce infrastructure across the Indian startup ecosystem.

The partnership will identify, mentor, and fund Indian startups building applications where AI agents can discover, negotiate, and transact autonomously: from SMB sales automation to supply chain coordination to cross-border payments.

The Agentic Commerce Opportunity

As AI agents become capable of acting on behalf of businesses and consumers, they need infrastructure purpose-built for machine-speed commerce. Todays payment rails and marketplaces were designed for humans, not millions of agents negotiating and settling transactions simultaneously. Traditional blockchains create consensus bottlenecks. Centralized platforms sacrifice trustlessness. Neither scales to the demands of the autonomous economy.

The Unicity Protocol solves this: a novel peer-to-peer blockchain architecture that eliminates the shared ledger entirely, enabling private negotiation, atomic settlement, and throughput exceeding 300 million transactions per second with 1-second finality and fixed microcent fees.

“India has 63 million SMBs, most of them bandwidth-constrained,” said Pankaj Thakar, Partner at PadUp Ventures. “They can‘t afford sales teams or 24/7 customer support. AI agents change that equation entirely; but only if the infrastructure exists for agents to transact at scale. That’s what Unicity provides.”

What the Program Includes

PadUp is launching a dedicated Agentic Commerce Track within its acceleration program PrepUp, focused on startups building on the Unicity Protocol. The partnership will drive joint go-to-market efforts targeting Indian SMBs and enterprises, with qualified startups gaining access to investment from both PadUp‘s network and Unicity’s ecosystem fund.

• Dedicated Agentic Commerce Track: PadUp will launch a focused acceleration track for startups building on the Unicity Protocol
• Go-to-Market in India: Joint efforts to bring agentic commerce solutions to Indian SMBs and enterprises
• Funding: Qualified startups will have access to investment from both PadUp‘s network and Unicity’s ecosystem fund

Why India

India‘s startup ecosystem, now the world’s third-largest with over 112,000 recognized startups — is uniquely positioned for agentic commerce adoption. A massive, underserved SMB market, deep developer talent across AI and blockchain, rapidly expanding digital payments infrastructure, and established cross-border trade corridors to the UAE, Southeast Asia, and beyond make it one of the highest-potential markets for the autonomous economy.

“India doesnt just adopt technology, it scales it,” said Mike Gault, CEO of Unicity Labs. “UPI proved that. We believe Indian founders will build some of the most important agentic commerce applications in the world, and PadUp is exactly the right partner to find and support them.”