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Blaxel, a startup building cloud infrastructure specifically designed for artificial intelligence agents, has raised $7.3 million in seed funding led by First Round Capital, the company announced Tuesday. The financing comes just three months after the six-founder team graduated from Y Combinator’s Spring 2025 batch, underscoring investor appetite for infrastructure plays in the rapidly expanding AI agent market.
The San Francisco-based company is betting that the current generation of cloud providers — Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure — are fundamentally mismatched for the new wave of autonomous AI systems that can take actions without human intervention. These AI agents, which handle everything from managing calendars to generating code, require dramatically different infrastructure than traditional web applications built for human users.
“The current cloud providers have been designed for the Web 2.0, Software as a Service era,” said Paul Sinaï, Blaxel’s co-founder and CEO, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat. “But with this new wave of agentic AI, we believe that there is a need for a new type of infrastructure which is dedicated to AI agents.”
Why AWS and Google Cloud weren’t built for autonomous AI agents
The timing reflects a broader shift in enterprise computing as companies increasingly deploy AI agents for customer service, data processing, and workflow automation. Unlike traditional applications where databases sit alongside web servers in predictable patterns, AI agents create unique networking challenges by connecting to language models in one region, APIs in another cloud, and knowledge bases elsewhere—all while users expect instant responses.
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Blaxel has already demonstrated significant traction, processing millions of agent requests daily across 16 global regions by the end of their Y Combinator batch. One customer is running over 1 billion seconds of agent runtime to process millions of videos, representing a scale that illustrates the infrastructure demands of AI-first companies. …