Mural, a New York fintech founded in 2022 by two former Palantir engineers, has raised a $15 million Series A led by Tether, with North Island Ventures and existing backers joining. The round brings total funding to $28 million and arrives with real traction behind it: $2.1 billion in payments processed across 128 countries since its API launched in 2025, with 2026 volume already running nearly six times last year's total.
Highlights#
- What Mural sells is control. Its account system lets businesses set spending limits, pre-approve counterparties, and require extra sign-off above thresholds, so a company deploying AI agents decides exactly which transactions the software can initiate on its own and which need a human.
- One rail, three worlds. A single Mural account holds dollars, local currencies, and stablecoins, with identity verification and regulatory compliance attached. Customers include payroll provider Deel, browser maker Opera, and fintech platform Axexo. Payment services run through Mural Networks, a FinCEN-registered money services business.
- Tether's angle. CEO Paolo Ardoino pointed to Mural's record of connecting enterprise software to stablecoin payment services. The deal sits alongside Tether's other AI bets, including AIsa and Tenstorrent, as the issuer pushes deeper into programmable money.
- Mural CEO Sinclair Toffa frames the stakes plainly: the economy is about to gain ten billion new participants, none of them human.
Why it matters#
Agents with wallets are only useful if owners can bound what those wallets do. Spend caps, counterparty allowlists, and threshold approvals are the same controls escrow and reputation layers trade on, and Mural is building them into the bank-and-stablecoin plumbing itself rather than bolting them on after.