Summary
Natural raised a $30M Series A (Forerunner-led; total $40M+) to build the foundational payments stack for AI agents — entities that will hold and move money, request and accept payments, make purchases, and transact across currencies, banks, networks and rails. Its differentiator is owning the entire stack directly rather than stitching together banking partners.
Key Points
- $30M Series A led by Kirsten Green at Forerunner; total funding $40M+; round raised when company was 193 days old.
- Co-founders: Kahlil Lalji (CEO), Eric Wang, Walt Leung; company started 342 days ago; 17 employees.
- Product suite: 13 products total; 6 GA now — Wallets (FDIC-insured), Vaults (one-way), Pay, Request, Transfer, Connect.
- Coming months: Voice (PCI over phone), Accept (agents as merchants), Cards.
- Q4: Charge (per-API-call billing), Credit (lines of credit for agents), Direct (call specific payment rails at runtime), Billing (success-based billing).
- Owns primitives directly: ledgering, money movement, multi-bank settlement, multi-currency, fraud & compliance, agent identity & observability.
- CEO thesis: "The shift from human-executed payments to agent-executed payments is already underway"; the question is who builds safe, reliable, compliant, useful infrastructure at scale.
- Backers include Y Combinator (Pete Koomen), Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari, Brex CBO Art Levy, Jake & Logan Paul (Antifund), and CEOs of Increase, Browserbase, HappyRobot, Privy.
- Connects to broader theme: programmable, always-on money rails (Augustus clearing bank; Open USD stablecoin distribution).