Halliday Secures $20M in Series A Funding, Led by a16z Crypto

Halliday, a developer of workflow protocols, has successfully secured $20 million in Series A funding, with Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm (a16z crypto) leading the investment. This funding round brings Halliday’s total funding to over $26 million, underscoring the growing confidence in the company’s approach to integrating AI with blockchain technology.

Halliday’s core innovation, the Agentic Workflow Protocol (AWP), addresses one of the most significant challenges in AI development: safely deploying autonomous agents in decentralized environments. The protocol creates “immutable guardrails” that ensure AI agents can execute tasks within strictly defined parameters, mitigating the risk of exploits or unintended actions. This safety infrastructure is crucial for businesses that require oversight of AI-enabled automations, particularly in financial systems and digital assets.

The company has already deployed its AI-enabled workflow engine with several high-profile partners, including DeFi Kingdoms, Core Wallet by Ava Labs, and ApeChain. These partnerships demonstrate Halliday’s capability to automate complex, multi-step processes such as treasury management, recurring payments, and business-to-business transactions across multiple blockchain networks. By handling protocol integrations, data translation, and reliable multi-chain execution, Halliday enables teams to create breakthrough applications in a fraction of the time typically required.

For enterprise customers, Halliday’s technology offers a pathway to leveraging blockchain networks and AI agents without the need for specialized development teams or the security risks associated with traditional smart contracts. This could significantly accelerate the adoption of AI in financial services, where institutions have shown interest in autonomous systems but have been deterred by security and compliance concerns. Halliday’s approach aims to transform AI-blockchain integration from a capital-intensive project to an operational expense, potentially reducing development costs by a factor of 10,000.

The new funding will allow Halliday to accelerate the development of its AI workflow protocol and expand its team. The company has already attracted talent from leading technology companies, including Alphabet, Meta, Netflix, Stripe, and Compound. Halliday Payments, a first-party application built on the protocol, exemplifies how AI agents can simplify complex processes by offering an end-to-end payments solution that handles the intricacies of blockchain transactions, thereby lowering the barrier for new users.

As businesses continue to explore AI’s potential to automate complex workflows, solutions like Halliday’s that address the fundamental challenges of safety and compliance could play a crucial role in bringing these technologies to mainstream adoption. By safely delegating workflows to autonomous systems, Halliday aims to transform enterprise operations, enabling teams to create breakthrough applications in hours rather than years.