Sean Neville has a knack for finding opportunities amid tech booms. In 2013, as investors grew more excited about cryptocurrencies and blockchain, he cofounded the crypto startup Circle. The company would eventually grow to become the world’s second largest issuer of stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to underlying assets, like the U.S. dollar. In April, Circle filed to go public.
Now, Neville, who is still on the board of Circle after leaving in early 2020, has a new venture that aims to capitalize off of the AI boom. On Tuesday, he announced that his startup, Catena Labs, which he said plans to build an “AI-native bank,” had raised $18 million in a seed round led by the crypto arm of Andreessen Horowitz. Other investors include Breyer Capital, Circle Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and football legend Tom Brady.
“There won’t be any humans or businesses that are executing financial transactions directly,” Neville predicted. “There will only be agents, only AIs in the future.”
Investors in the funding round received equity with an attached token warrant, or allocation of a yet-to-be-released cryptocurrency. Neville declined to disclose his company’s valuation and said his startup has no plans at this point to launch a cryptocurrency or stablecoin.
Stablecoins to AI
Catena Labs has been in the works for years.
After Neville left Circle in 2020, he spent time researching the burgeoning AI space. A software engineer by trade who worked at Adobe earlier in his career, he eventually emerged from his one-year sabbatical “with pretty strong conviction that we’re entering this AI-native version of the web,” he said.
In 2021, he, along with Matt Venables, a former senior engineering executive at Circle, created a venture studio where they experimented with AI and other new tech, including decentralized identity, or methods through which users online can verify who they are without handing over, for example, their passport to a bank.
But, in 2023, a year after OpenAI released its popular chatbot ChatGPT, Neville and his team eventually moved to go all-in on artificial intelligence with a focus on updating the same financial rails they had grown familiar with through their work at Circle.
The current financial pipelines are old, outdated, and not built for a future where bots will control who gets paid when, Neville said. “You should be able to meet your financial advisor and your banker everywhere you want to be,” he argued. In other words, while humans will be in the background of his AI-centric vision of finance, AI “agents” will be the ones most often speaking with consumers—and their AI representatives.
Neville and his team of only eight other employees have built their version of an “AI-native bank” from the ground up. While he was hazy on their product roadmap, he did say his team had developed an open-source protocol for how they believe AI-powered payments and AI identity should work.
And will his forthcoming product include blockchain? Derived from Latin, Catena means a series of chains. Neville said software from Catena Labs will integrate, but not be defined, by stablecoins. “It solves certain problems,” he said of the cryptocurrency. “It doesn’t solve all the problems.”
