companies

Kaito

Seattle-based AI intelligence platform that indexes crypto's social, governance, and research data for professional Web3 teams.

Kaito is a Seattle-based company founded in 2022 by Yu Hu, a former Citadel and Deutsche Bank investment professional, that built a search and intelligence engine specifically for crypto markets. Its core product, Kaito Pro, indexes thousands of sources, including X posts, governance forums, research reports, podcasts, and conference transcripts, and layers semantic search, sentiment scoring, and alerting on top, aimed at investment, research, and marketing teams rather than retail traders. Kaito raised roughly $10.8 million across a seed and Series A round in 2023 from Dragonfly Capital, Sequoia Capital China, Jane Street, and others, and later became known well beyond crypto research circles for Kaito Yaps, a points system that rewarded X users for posting about partner projects and fed a widely watched "attention economy" leaderboard tied to the KAITO token launch in 2025. That system ended abruptly in January 2026, when X banned apps that reward incentivized posting, citing a flood of AI-generated spam. Kaito sunset Yaps and pivoted to Kaito Studio, a vetted creator-brand marketplace, while KAITO's price fell roughly 17% on the news. The shutdown followed earlier community frustration that Yaps points had converted into smaller-than-expected token allocations at launch.

Founded

2022

Headquarters

Seattle, United States

Sector

data