Market Pulse
Market Pulse
The $8 Billion Word Problem
In February 2026, five companies raised a combined $8 billion for agent infrastructure. Every single one pitched "reliability." Temporal meant something specific by that word. Daytona meant something different. Databricks, something else entirely. Astelia, yet another thing. Four layers of the stack, four theories of where agents actually break. Somewhere in procurement offices right now, teams are choosing between these theories, locking into a definition the market hasn't finished writing.
The $8 Billion Word Problem
In February 2026, five companies raised a combined $8 billion for agent infrastructure. Every single one pitched "reliability." Temporal meant something specific by that word. Daytona meant something different. Databricks, something else entirely. Astelia, yet another thing. Four layers of the stack, four theories of where agents actually break. Somewhere in procurement offices right now, teams are choosing between these theories, locking into a definition the market hasn't finished writing.
Research Radar
Security Threat Modeling for Emerging AI-Agent Protocols: A Comparative Analysis of MCP, A2A, Agora, and ANP
The definitional gaps visible in commercial agent deployments run all the way down to the protocol layer itself.
Published weeks before NIST's March 9 deadline for public comment on agent security, landing squarely in the gap NIST is trying to close.
Research Radar
Autonomous Agents on Blockchains: Standards, Execution Models, and Trust Boundaries
Five authority tiers from read-only analytics to autonomous signing, each carrying security implications that existing standards don't address.
As agents gain financial transaction capabilities, "authorized to act" splinters across execution contexts with no shared interface standard.
Research Radar
Agent2Agent Threats in Safety-Critical LLM Assistants: A Human-Centric Taxonomy
When human and agent instructions carry identical privilege at the protocol level, a foundational governance assumption simply evaporates.
Safety-critical deployments on A2A face a structural mismatch between the authorization boundaries they assume and those that actually exist.
Research Radar
A Survey of Agent Interoperability Protocols: MCP, ACP, A2A, and ANP
The survey corroborates that protocol-by-protocol security patching won't substitute for a unified cross-protocol framework.
Protocol development simply outran security standardization, and the resulting fragmentation looks increasingly structural rather than incidental.
The Easy Domain
Basis just closed a $100 million Series B led by Accel, with GV and Khosla Ventures participating, at a $1.15 billion valuation. The interesting thing here is the domain, not the check size.
Accounting is one of the rare professional fields where "correct" has a precise, externally verifiable definition. Debits equal credits. Tax codes are codified. Audit standards exist and are enforceable. The specification work that most agent deployments struggle to define has been done by the profession itself, over centuries.
That the largest domain-specific agent bet lands where verification is easiest tells you something about everywhere else.
Further Reading
