Robutler Raises $400K to Build a Platform Where AI Agents, Not Just Humans, Discover and Pay Each Other

Robutler has raised 400,000 dollars from ZAS Ventures, a US based venture capital firm investing in AI, SaaS, and robotics companies founded by Ukrainians, marking the first institutional check into the company. The investment was made across both ZAS Ventures' Fund I and Fund II.

Founded in 2025 by Volodymyr Seliuchenko, Robutler operates out of Los Gatos, California and Kyiv, Ukraine. The company describes its mission in terms of shifting how software gets built and monetized entirely: rather than a small number of companies building and renting out finished applications, Robutler is trying to create what it calls a community‑built software ecosystem, where anyone can publish, remix, and be paid for contributing to a shared library of tools.

The consumer‑facing layer of that vision is a public platform offering a shared library of professional‑grade applications spanning documents, presentations, design, video, engineering, whiteboards, project management, music, and games, all built with real‑time collaboration. Every app on the platform is free to use, and Robutler pays the makers whose apps get used, along with the earlier makers whose work those apps were remixed from, creating a chain of attribution and compensation that follows an app's lineage rather than rewarding only its most recent creator. Seliuchenko framed the shift directly: "Here every app is free to use, and Robutler pays the makers whose apps get used, along with the makers they remixed from. It is a shift from renting software to a community building it together."

Underneath that consumer‑facing app layer sits the infrastructure ZAS Ventures specifically underwrote: Robutler's Web of Agents, a system that lets applications and AI agents discover one another and collaborate using natural language, rather than requiring hard‑coded, pre‑built integrations between every pair of systems that need to interact. The platform connects to external AI assistants and coding agents, including Claude and Codex, positioning Robutler not merely as an app marketplace but as connective infrastructure for a broader, emerging ecosystem in which AI agents increasingly need to find, trust, and transact with each other autonomously.

ZAS Ventures founder and managing partner Andrew Zinchuk described the firm's reasoning for making Robutler its first investment in the company in stark infrastructural terms. "The discovery, trust, and payment infrastructure for agents is the missing piece for the agentic internet, and Robutler is addressing this head‑on," Zinchuk said, adding that the firm's investment thesis centers on backing category‑defining infrastructure builders with strong execution capability.

Robutler has already built out a meaningful technical and intellectual property foundation ahead of this round. The company has filed three patent applications covering agent discovery, trust ranking, and the app‑usage attribution system underpinning its maker payout model. It has also published research called TrustFlow on arXiv, the open academic preprint repository, giving outside researchers visibility into the trust and reputation mechanisms underlying its agent‑to‑agent collaboration system. Additionally, Robutler has built two open protocols: Agent OAuth, addressing agent identity and authentication, and UAMP, addressing agent‑to‑agent messaging, both intended to give the broader developer community shared, interoperable standards for building agentic applications rather than each company inventing its own incompatible protocol.

ZAS Ventures itself has built a notable track record within the Ukrainian startup ecosystem since its founding in September 2023 by Zinchuk and Artem Volkhonskyi. The Delaware‑incorporated fund, with offices in San Francisco and Kyiv, focuses specifically on pre‑seed and seed stage investments in AI, SaaS, and robotics companies founded by Ukrainians, wherever in the world they choose to build. The firm has backed more than 25 companies across its two funds since 2023 and was named Investor of the Year 2025 by the Ukrainian Startup Fund, giving its decision to make its first institutional check into Robutler a degree of signal value within that specific investor community.

With the new funding, Robutler plans to continue developing its discovery, trust, and payment infrastructure stack for AI agents, while expanding its library of collaborative, remixable software applications available to makers and users on the consumer‑facing side of the platform. The company's underlying bet is that as AI agents increasingly take on tasks that require interacting with other agents and applications autonomously, whoever builds the trusted, standardized infrastructure layer connecting those agents, handling identity, discovery, and payment, stands to capture durable value regardless of which individual applications or agents ultimately win out on top of that layer. Whether Robutler can establish its Web of Agents and open protocols as genuine industry standards, rather than one of several competing approaches to agent infrastructure now emerging across the AI ecosystem, will likely determine how much of that underlying opportunity the company is ultimately able to capture.