Catena Labs is building what it describes as the first AI-native financial institution, financial infrastructure designed from the ground up for AI agents rather than humans. The company's thesis is that legacy financial systems are poorly suited to agentic commerce: they cannot natively handle agent identity and trust, their payment rails are slow and expensive, and they lack capabilities purpose-built for AI-driven transactions.
The company was co-founded by Sean Neville, who previously co-founded Circle and helped create the USDC stablecoin, alongside Matt Venables, a former Circle executive. That pedigree positions Catena at the intersection of regulated payments and AI, with a plan to use regulated stablecoins to offer near-instant settlement, minimal transaction costs, and easy integration into AI workflows.
Catena's flagship release is the Agent Commerce Kit (ACK), a set of open-source protocols and building blocks that tackle agent identity and payments. Built on open W3C web standards, ACK enables AI agents to operate their own dedicated accounts and wallets, establish and manage their own identities, and engage with paid services through standardized paywalls, the connective tissue agentic commerce needs to function safely.
The startup emerged from stealth in May 2025 with an $18 million seed round led by a16z crypto. It followed with a $30 million Series A led by Acrew Capital and a16z crypto, with participation from Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, and QED. Catena's platform also lets humans set guardrails for how their AI surrogates move money, including spending limits, approved recipients, and account-holding caps.
Notably, Catena Labs has filed for a national trust bank charter in New York with the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, seeking regulatory standing to process payments and hold customer funds. That regulatory ambition distinguishes Catena from purely software-layer agent-payment startups and underscores its bet that agentic finance will require licensed, trusted institutions.
