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’s secured $30 million in a Series A funding round led by Acrew Capital and the crypto arm of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z crypto).
Neville declined to specify at what valuation he raised the capital for his newest startup, which drummed up 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.
On Wednesday, Catena Labs also announced that it’s 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’ money.
“The majority, if not all initial transactions, will be executed by agents,” Neville predicted in an interview with Fortune.
Agentic finance
Neville, who is still on the board at Circle, isn’t 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 and Visa 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.
“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,” Lauren Kolodny, founding partner at Acrew Capital, told Fortune.
That future hasn’t come to pass just yet, but Neville and his cofounder Matt Venables, a onetime executive at Circle, believe it’s 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.
“It’s very early days,” said Neville. “I 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.”
When he first unveiled Catena Labs in 2025, Neville was coy about how exactly his startup was building an “AI-native bank.” 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’s bank account can hold at one time.
Still, Neville doesn’t believe AI can do everything. When asked about how he was deploying his new capital, he said, “We are hiring humans.”