Natural raises $30 million to build payment infrastructure for AI agents
The San Francisco startup says it will use the Series A to build wallets, transfers, cards and compliance tools for autonomous AI systems.
By Marcus Adeyemi · Startups Editor
· 3 min read
Natural has raised a $30 million Series A to build payments infrastructure for AI agents, bringing its total funding to more than $40 million less than a year after it was founded. Forerunner Ventures’ Kirsten Green led the round, with Human Capital, Abstract, Wischoff Ventures and several angel investors participating.
The San Francisco company is positioning itself against Stripe, though with a narrower and still largely unproven starting point: payments for autonomous software agents rather than human-operated businesses. Natural did not disclose a valuation, revenue, customer count or transaction volume for its own platform.
Natural was co-founded by CEO Kahlil Lalji, Eric Wang and Walt Leung 342 days ago, according to the company. The Series A comes 193 days after launch. Lalji previously co-founded YC-backed fintech startup Ivella and joined EarnIn in 2024. The company has 17 employees and says it is hiring across functions.
What Natural is building
Natural says AI agents will need financial infrastructure to hold wallets, receive money, pay invoices, make purchases, issue cards and move funds between banks and currencies without a person approving every action. That framing puts the company in a category many fintech and AI infrastructure companies are now circling, but where real transaction volume remains early.
The company says it operates its own stack across ledgering, multi-bank settlement, multi-currency movement, fraud detection, compliance and agent identity verification. That is the main technical claim Natural is using to separate itself from companies that layer software over third-party rails. The company did not provide independent metrics showing how much of that infrastructure is live at scale.
Natural says six products are generally available: FDIC-insured agent wallets, one-way vaults that can receive money but cannot autonomously release it, peer-to-peer payment and request tools, internal and external transfer infrastructure, and a marketplace-building product. Planned products include voice-based PCI payments, debit and charge cards issued for agents, and billing per API call. Natural also says credit lines for agents and direct access to payment rails are planned for the fourth quarter.
A crowded early category
The agentic payments market is attracting small, early-stage startups as well as incumbent payment companies. London-based Ralio raised $2.5 million in April 2026 for agentic payment controls and identity verification. Paygentic raised $2 million for billing infrastructure aimed at AI startups. Both are pre-seed companies.
Stripe is the larger competitive reference point. The payments company, valued at more than $150 billion, is also building agentic payment capabilities into its platform. Natural’s wager is that a company built specifically for AI agents can move faster than a payments incumbent adapting existing systems.
Forerunner’s participation is notable because the firm is better known for consumer investments, including Chime, Warby Parker, Faire, Dollar Shave Club and Glossier. Green has described Natural as combining consumer DNA with AI infrastructure, according to the company. That is a thesis about financial behavior as much as API design.
The market remains more forecast than usage
Market projections give the category room to attract venture dollars. Nevermined projects agentic AI payments will grow from $7 billion today to $93 billion by 2032. MarketsandMarkets estimates the broader AI agents market will expand from $7.84 billion in 2025 to $52.62 billion by 2030, a 46.3% compound annual growth rate. McKinsey puts global payments revenue at $2.5 trillion in 2025.
The current usage base is much smaller than those forecasts imply. One analysis cited by the company put actual protocol transaction volume at $28,000 per day globally in early 2026. Natural is raising for an infrastructure opportunity before the market has shown infrastructure-scale demand. The round gives it capital to build ahead of usage, but the company still has to prove that agents will become meaningful payment actors soon enough to justify the stack it is assembling.
This story draws on original reporting from TechFundingNews.
