A new payments stack aims to let AI agents settle transactions without human signoff, potentially multiplying global payment volumes while challenging incumbents.
AI agents are already taking on increasingly complex tasks: identifying suppliers who can conduct freight transport, comparing prices, and coordinating delivery with suppliers. But when it comes to paying for shipments, they still require human involvement.
In the modern financial landscape, there is infrastructure that moves money and financial information between banks, companies, and consumers. However, these rails were built for transactions initiated by humans, not for autonomous AI agents. Traditional payment systems, such as credit cards and ACH, require human authorization, which slows down the work of agents designed to operate autonomously.
One of the new companies in this area is Natural, which aims to completely rethink the system from scratch. The company has raised $30 million in a new round of funding to realize an ambitious plan and go directly into competition with giants like Stripe.
About a year ago, Natural’s co-founder and CEO Kahlil Lalji realized that agent-based AI systems were evolving faster than the existing financial architecture, which does not support autonomous payments between suppliers, payment collection, or interactions between agents.
Lalji has experience in banking and finance, but while preparing to launch another startup he wanted to avoid that sector. His previous startup Ivella, which provided banking and financial products for couples, was sold in 2023 to Earnin, where he worked as an engineer for two years. He told TechCrunch that these events left him somewhat disillusioned with the financial sector after the end of the era of zero interest rates.
And yet Lalji could not ignore the opportunity.
I kept coming back to this. It feels that agent payments will become the structurally most important problem in this space.
– Kahlil Lalji
Lalji joined forces with Eric Wang, co-founder of Ivella, and Walt Leung, a former engineering manager at Nextdoor, and in 2025 founded Natural. The startup positions itself as a layer of orchestration for agents that enables them to move and hold funds. The integration of Natural’s infrastructure gives agents the ability to execute autonomous payments, collect funds, and conduct operations with both people and other agents.
Investor interest led to the involvement of Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner of VC Forerunner, who led a Series A of $30 million, bringing Natural’s total funding to $40 million. Green became interested not only in helping agents pay for goods and complete purchases but also in the ambition to rethink the entire payment infrastructure, including the flow for dispute resolution.
Although Natural had previously been in beta, Lalji told TechCrunch that he had already made critically important architectural decisions that give the company a “good chance” to compete with incumbents like Stripe, which is also trying to rethink payment rails for AI agents.
Lalji hopes that the speed of development will allow Natural to outpace classical giants and build a financial core for AI agent payments. The team has brought in senior specialists who previously worked at fintech giants Stripe, Ramp, and Square.
Although Natural regards Stripe as its main competitor, other startups – notably Skyfire Systems backed by DCVC – strive to rethink the payment backbone for AI agents using stablecoins pegged to the dollar. Natural plans to integrate stablecoins into its architecture, while also supporting traditional bank payments.
Despite the fierce race for dominance, Lalji believed the overall market could grow significantly if transactions happened at “computer speed” rather than human. “The number of payments in the world could be two, three, or four orders of magnitude larger than today’s volume,” he compared.
The number of payments that could take place in the world could be two, three, or four orders of magnitude larger than the number of payments that exist today, he said.
– Kahlil Lalji
Natural aims to restructure the payment infrastructure for AI agents and become the backbone of the financial ecosystem of an autonomous economy, but the competitive landscape with Stripe and other players will remain highly active.