Sean Neville, who cofounded the stablecoin giant Circle, has raised another stash of capital from top-flight venture capitalists. His startup Catena Labs, which builds tools to allow AI agents to safely conduct financial transactions, announced Wednesday that it\u2019s secured $30 million in a Series A funding round led by Acrew Capital and the crypto arm of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z crypto).<\/p>\n
Neville declined to specify at what valuation he raised the capital for his newest startup, which drummed up<\/a> an initial round of $18 million led by a16z crypto in 2025. Other participants in the more recent fundraise include Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, and QED.\u00a0<\/p>\n On Wednesday, Catena Labs also announced that it\u2019s applying for a national trust bank charter in New York from the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, as the company seeks regulatory backing to process payments and hold customers\u2019 money.<\/p>\n \u201cThe majority, if not all initial transactions, will be executed by agents,\u201d Neville predicted in an interview with Fortune.\u00a0<\/p>\n Agentic finance<\/p>\n Neville, who is still on the board at Circle, isn\u2019t the only founder to posit that AI will play a major role in payments. Agentic finance has become a buzzword in fintech, as the likes of Stripe<\/a> and Visa<\/a> predict that, in the near future, humans will task bots to order groceries for them, pay for subscriptions on their behalf, or move money between their bank accounts.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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,\u201d Lauren Kolodny, founding partner at Acrew Capital, told Fortune.<\/p>\n That future hasn\u2019t come to pass just yet, but Neville and his cofounder Matt Venables, a onetime executive at Circle, believe it\u2019s close enough at hand to build out a suite of tools to give humans confidence that their AI agents are handling money safely and correctly.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s very early days,\u201d said Neville. \u201cI think the main learning has been, as we evolved from thesis to reality and moving real money, is that giving an agent a wallet is pretty easy compared with giving a business a governed way to trust it.\u201d<\/p>\n When he first unveiled Catena Labs in 2025, Neville was coy about how exactly his startup was building an \u201cAI-native bank.\u201d Now, he and his team of 11 employees have settled on a clearer set of offerings. Catena Labs has opened up invite-only access to its platform, which lets humans establish the guardrails for how their AI surrogates move money. That includes spending limits, who the AI agents can send money to, and how much cash each user\u2019s bank account can hold at one time.<\/p>\n Still, Neville doesn\u2019t believe AI can do everything. When asked about how he was deploying his new capital, he said, \u201cWe are hiring humans.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sean Neville, who cofounded the stablecoin giant Circle, has raised another stash of capital from top-flight venture capitalists.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":46299,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[405,7537,3278,14259,139],"class_list":["post-46298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agentic-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","tag-blockchain","tag-stablecoins","tag-venture-capital"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46298\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}