Circle and Catena Cofounder Sean Neville Raises $18 Million for ‘First AI-Native Bank’

Sean Neville, co-founder of the USDC stablecoin creator Circle and CEO of Catena Labs, revealed a significant fundraise from major players for Catena’s new project: an AI-native financial institution.

The $18 million financing round was led by a16z crypto, with participation from Breyer Capital, Circle Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, CoinFund, Pillar VC, and Stanford Engineering VF.

Angels also include notable names, such as Balaji Srinivasan, Bradley Horowitz, Hamel Husain, Kevin Lin, Peter Mattoon, Sam Palmisano, and Tom Brady.

Catena says it will use the raised funds to boost the development of the “first fully regulated AI-native financial institution (FI).” The team will also be working on the FI’s underlying technology. The institution will serve the novel and distinctive needs of the evolving AI economy.

Moreover, the website notes that the institution will be purpose-built for AI agents and increasingly operated by AI digital workers. Human collaborators will provide oversight. The novel bank will pioneer AI-specific risk management and compliance, the team claims.

Neville predicted that AI agents will soon “conduct most economic transactions.” However, as of now, the financial systems are both unprepared and resistant to interactions with AI. “That’s why we’re building an AI-native financial institution that will give AI agents, and the businesses and consumers they serve, the ability to transact safely and efficiently,” he claims.

Furthermore, Matt Venables, CTO and co-founder of Catena Labs, adds that the financial infrastructure creates major friction for AI agents. Legacy payment rails are slow, fragile, and expensive, he notes. Therefore, they’re “constraining the potential for AI commerce.”

Moreover, Venables touched upon the stablecoin utilization in this new financial institution. “While we are integrating existing payment networks as we bridge into the future, we’re focused on transforming how money moves in the AI economy by using regulated stablecoins that offer near-instant settlement, minimal transaction costs, and easy integration with AI workflows,” he says.

Catena Launches Open Source Agent Commerce Kit

Jim Breyer, founder and CEO of Breyer Capital, opines that Neville and Catena are “uniquely qualified to lead the creation of the first AI-native bank.” This is a massive undertaking as “integrating AI into commerce demands a rebuild of financial infrastructure.”

Neville and Jeremy Allaire founded the crypto trading and payments startup Circle in October 2013. Six years later, at the very end of 2019, Neville stepped down as Circle’s co-CEO. He remains on the board.

Moreover, Neville went on to co-found AI-powered products and services provider Catena in 2022. The company says it aims to enable AI financial services. It will do so by solving the issues burdening AI agents and agentic commerce. These include a lack of capabilities specifically for AI commerce, slow and expensive payment rails, and the inability to handle agent identity and trust.

Therefore, the team says that Catena is building upon protocols, patterns, emerging standards, and open source components to “address new requirements AI agents create for identity and payments.” The first step is releasing a new open-source project. It defines several open-source building blocks, protocols, and patterns for agentic commerce.

The open-source Agent Commerce Kit (ACK) identifies patterns, components, and emerging protocols necessary for verifiable agent identity. These are also needed for payment flows and receipts between agents, humans, and businesses.

Moreover, ACK is just one of the standards Catena says it’s building. It plans to offer “a broad suite of licensed financial services” specifically related to AI systems working as independent economic actors. This will include solutions for risk, security, and compliance challenges.

“The rise of AI agents is reshaping what’s possible in online commerce, making it clear that we need a financial layer built specifically for how these systems operate—one that can handle authentication, payments, and trust at scale,” says Chris Dixon, founder and managing partner at a16z crypto. building financial infrastructure that agentic commerce can depend on, and we’re excited to support their vision.”

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