Natural, a year-old San Francisco startup, has raised $30 million in a Series A to build payment infrastructure designed from the ground up for AI agents. The round was led by Kirsten Green of Forerunner and brings the company's total funding past $40 million. The core bet: financial rails built for humans are the wrong shape for software that transacts on its own.
Highlights#
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Natural wants to be the financial backbone for agents, letting them hold funds, send and collect payments, and transact with people and other agents. It shipped six products to general availability alongside the round, including FDIC-insured Wallets (banked by Column N.A.), one-way Vaults, Pay, Request, Transfer, and Connect. Cards, Voice, and a merchant-style Accept product are next.
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Rather than bolt onto existing card and ACH plumbing, the company is building the primitives itself: ledgering, money movement, multi-bank settlement, multi-currency support, fraud and compliance, plus agent identity and observability.
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CEO Kahlil Lalji, previously founder of YC-backed Ivella (sold to Earnin in 2023), calls agentic payments "structurally the most important problem" in the space and argues transaction counts could climb several orders of magnitude once agents pay at machine speed.
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Natural is positioning squarely against Stripe, which is also racing to retool its rails for agents. It plans to support stablecoins alongside traditional bank payments, the same seam where rivals like DCVC-backed Skyfire are focused.
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Forerunner's Green said she was drawn to the breadth of the ambition, including how disputed agent transactions get handled.
Why it matters#
Agent-to-agent commerce only works if money can move, settle, and be trusted at machine speed, with clear identity and a real path to resolve disputes. Rails like these, alongside escrow and reputation layers, are the precondition for agents becoming reliable economic actors rather than novelty buyers.