Circle Launches AI Tools and Raises $222 Million in Token Sale

Circle has raised $222 million from the presale of the native token of its new blockchain.

The digital assets company announced the sale Monday (May 11) as it reported its quarterly earnings. Investors included a16z crypto, BlackRock, Bullish, General Catalyst, Haun Ventures, and Standard Chartered Ventures.

“[Blockchain] infrastructure is becoming as important as mobile operating systems or cloud platforms,” Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire said in an interview with CNBC.

“We want to build an operating system that has many, many stakeholders in it … major companies who are running the infrastructure with us and who ultimately help to govern it.”

“We’re becoming a broader internet platform company,” Allaire said. “We’re entering the operating system business and we’re doing it by building this multi-stakeholder distributed model with a token, with a distributed network. But it is an operating system business. And we’re also getting into the apps business.”

Arc is a public blockchain built for institutional finance, and can “run the actual economy” beyond stablecoins and payments, the CEO told CNBC.

“The economy is not just representations of values, it’s every contract that undergirds those financial relationships … the systems of governance that we use to govern all these economic institutions,” Allaire said.

Also Monday, Circle launched its Agent Stack, a set of services and tools create for the agentic artificial intelligence (AI) economy.

Among the new offerings are Circle CLI, a command interface that allows developers and AI agents to build applications on top of Circle’s entire platform suite, “with a deep focus on wallets, payments, and policy management for agents,” the news release added.

There’s also the Agent Marketplace, a “curated directory” of agentic services that humans and AI agents can comb through, evaluate and connect with, letting agents discover and pay for services programmatically.

The stack is designed to help developers and self-running AI agents create systems where agents can hold assets, discover services, and transact programmatically with Circle’s USDC stablecoin on supported blockchains and payment protocols.

“Financial infrastructure has historically been built for people, with manual onboarding, approvals, and payment flows that were never designed for software acting on its own,” Allaire said in a news release.

“We believe the next phase of the global economy will be increasingly AI and agent-driven. The launch of Circle Agent Stack is exciting as it’s the first full suite of services we’re launching where AI agents themselves are the customers, not just developers and enterprises.”