About Leo
Leo Li is Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of AEON, the settlement layer for the AI economy. He leads the engineering of AEON’s programmable payment primitives, which let AI agents transact across any currency, chain or protocol, routing through stablecoins, global Visa rails and emerging-market networks. Under his technical direction AEON has built native integrations with x402, ERC-8004, MCP and Google A2A, and has processed over $600 million in volume, serving more than two million users. Before co-founding AEON he was a software engineer at Google, where he worked on Google Ads across recommendation and tracking - high-throughput, low-latency plumbing that has to be right every time, which is the same problem a settlement layer has. AEON raised an $8 million pre-seed in May 2026 led by YZi Labs, with IDG Capital, HashKey Capital, Alchemy Ventures, SevenX Ventures and the Stanford Blockchain Builders Fund joining. His argument is that the bottleneck in the agentic economy is not the model but the settlement: an agent can reason its way to a decision and still have nowhere to put it, because the rails on the other side were built for a human with a card, and until that clears, autonomy stops at the checkout.
Areas of Expertise
- Payments
- AI
- Market Infrastructure
- Blockchain
- Digital Assets
