April 8, 2026
Dexter Labs Selected for Pump Fund's $3M Build in Public Program
Dexter Labs Corporation has been selected as a winner of Pump Fund's Build in Public program, a $3 million investment fund backing 12 companies across the Solana ecosystem. The investment is a $250,000 SAFE at a $10,000,000 post-money valuation. Dexter Labs was selected at the Product stage, the program's most advanced tier, reserved for companies with live infrastructure and demonstrated market traction.
The advisory board for the program includes Tim Draper of Draper Investments, Mason Nystrom of Pantera Capital, Saurabh Sharma of Jump Crypto, Anil Lulla of Delphi Digital, Peter Dimitrakos of Kraken, Mert Mumtaz of Helius, and representatives from Arca, Manifold Ventures, Privy, Polymarket, and 6MV.
Dexter Labs operates the payment, discovery, and monetization layer for the AI agent economy. The company's infrastructure enables AI agents to discover paid APIs, pay for them using stablecoins via the x402 protocol, and receive data — all within a single HTTP request, with no accounts, API keys, or human intervention required. The x402 protocol was developed by Coinbase and contributed to the Linux Foundation, with support from Stripe, Google, Visa, and Cloudflare.
The company's core strategic insight is that settlement infrastructure, offered at zero cost across eight blockchains, functions as a distribution channel rather than a revenue center. Every transaction that flows through Dexter's facilitator generates data about which APIs get called, by which agents, in what order, how often, and whether the response was useful. That data feeds the company's higher-order products: OpenDexter, a quality-verified catalog of x402 APIs where every endpoint is continuously tested with real payments; Instinct, a sponsored recommendation engine embedded in settlement receipts; and x402gle, a data intelligence product packaging transaction-level ecosystem visibility for builders, sellers, and institutional analysts.
The model is structurally comparable to how Google gave away search for free, built the largest index of the web through usage, then monetized attention and data against that index. Dexter gives away settlement, builds the most comprehensive index of AI-accessible APIs through facilitation volume, and monetizes discovery, recommendations, and intelligence against that index.
Dexter currently operates across Solana, Base, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Avalanche, BSC, and SKALE. OpenDexter indexes thousands of x402 resources with continuous real-payment verification and is available as an MCP server embedded in Claude, ChatGPT, and other MCP-compatible agent surfaces. The company publishes open-source SDKs — @dexterai/x402, @dexterai/mpp, and @dexterai/opendexter — and ERC-8004 on-chain reputation data on Base and Solana.
AI agents are going to spend money. Research agents will pay for datasets. Development agents will purchase compute. Workflow agents will coordinate services. The question was never whether this would happen — it was who would build the settlement layer, the discovery layer, and the intelligence layer on top. We built all three.
— Nick Sander, Founder & CEO
The investment will be used to expand multi-chain facilitator operations, scale the Dexter Marketplace, and continue development of the company's SDK and data products.
Read the full investment thesis at dexter.cash/thesis.