Circle cofounder raises $30M for AI-native bank Catena Labs
What's the deal? Sean Neville, cofounder of stablecoin giant Circle, has raised $30 million in a Series A round for Catena Labs, his startup that builds tools for AI agents to safely conduct financial transactions. The round was led by Acrew Capital and a16z crypto, with Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, and QED also participating.
Catena Labs has also applied for a national trust bank charter in New York from the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, seeking regulatory backing to process payments and hold customers' money. The company previously raised $18 million in an initial round led by a16z crypto in 2025.
Why now? Agentic finance — where AI bots handle payments and money movement on behalf of humans — has become a major theme in fintech. Stripe and Visa both predict a near future where people task bots to order groceries, pay subscriptions, or shuffle money between accounts.
"The opportunity to come up with the framework by which agents can make financial transactions on behalf of humans and businesses is obviously a huge one," said Lauren Kolodny, founding partner at Acrew Capital.
Catena Labs has opened invite-only access to its platform, which lets users set guardrails for how their AI agents move money — including spending limits, approved recipients, and account balance caps.
What could go wrong? The agentic finance future hasn't arrived yet. Neville himself called it "very early days," noting that giving an agent a wallet is easy compared with giving a business a governed way to trust it. The company has just 11 employees and is still building out its offerings.
Securing a bank charter adds another layer of complexity and regulatory scrutiny that could slow things down.
The signal: This raise reflects growing conviction among top-tier VCs that AI agents will soon handle a significant share of financial transactions. Neville predicted that "the majority, if not all initial transactions, will be executed by agents." The fact that a Circle cofounder is building infrastructure for this future — and that firms like a16z and General Catalyst are backing it twice — suggests the smart money sees agentic payments as an inevitability, not a hypothesis.
Read more: fortune.com
