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

Unicity Labs and PadUp Ventures have announced a strategic partnership to bring agentic commerce infrastructure to India, launching a dedicated accelerator track and joint go-to-market efforts that will identify, mentor and fund startups building AI agent-powered commerce applications. Unicity Labs — headquartered in Abu Dhabi with the Unicity Foundation in Switzerland overseeing protocol development and governance — has developed the Unicity Protocol, which the partners say can support private negotiation and atomic settlement at scale. PadUp Ventures, founded in 2015 and headquartered in Gurugram, will integrate the new Agentic Commerce Track into its PrepUp acceleration program and connect qualified startups to investment from both PadUp’s network and Unicity’s ecosystem fund.

"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."

Context and program details

The partnership aims to accelerate development of agentic commerce use cases where AI agents can discover, negotiate and transact autonomously — spanning SMB sales automation, supply chain coordination and cross-border payments. PadUp will launch a focused Agentic Commerce Track within PrepUp, the accelerator’s programmatic mentoring platform, to support startups building on the Unicity Protocol.

• Dedicated Agentic Commerce Track: PadUp will run a focused acceleration track for startups building on Unicity Protocol.
• Go-to-market in India: Joint efforts target Indian SMBs and enterprises for early deployments.
• Funding: Qualified startups will have access to investment from PadUp’s network and Unicity’s ecosystem fund.

Unicity Labs positions the Unicity Protocol as a departure from shared-ledger blockchains, saying it "replaces shared ledgers with peer-to-peer cryptographic objects" and can deliver throughput "exceeding 300 million transactions per second with 1-second finality and fixed microcent fees." The company has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Blockchange Ventures, with participation from Outlier Ventures and Tawasal.

PadUp promotes its virtual accelerator model as "Programmatic Mentoring and Assured Funding that Ensures 500% higher chances of success for Early Stage Technology Startups," and the firm says it has helped over 350 tech companies in India and the UAE that have generated $200 million in value for stakeholders. Portfolio companies mentioned by PadUp include IntelleWings, TruScholar and Olbrain.

Mike Gault, CEO of Unicity Labs, framed India as a proving ground for agentic commerce adoption: "India doesn't just adopt technology, it scales it," he said. "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."

Outlook

The partnership comes as India’s startup ecosystem — cited in the announcement as exceeding 112,000 recognized startups — presents a large addressable market with deep developer talent and established digital payments infrastructure. By combining PadUp’s accelerator reach and networks with Unicity’s protocol and seed backing, the partners aim to seed agentic commerce pilots with SMBs and enterprises and to channel early investments into ventures that can demonstrate agent-driven revenue and automation at machine speed.