AI agents can already do some pretty impressive things: researching suppliers, comparing prices, organizing deliveries, and even negotiating service terms in a fully autonomous way. They can identify who can ship a load, compare rates, and message the supplier to work out the details of the operation.
But when it comes time to actually pay the bill, everything grinds to a halt. 😬
The reason is simple and frustrating at the same time: all the financial infrastructure that exists today was built with humans on the other side of the transaction. The so-called financial rails, meaning the structure behind the movement of money and information between banks, companies, and consumers, were designed for operations initiated by people. Credit cards, ACH bank transfers, payment authorizations… all of it depends on someone pressing a button, signing something, or confirming a transaction. And when an agent needs to act on its own, at machine speed, that model simply doesn’t work.
That is exactly where Natural comes in, a startup founded in 2025 with a pretty straightforward mission: rebuild the financial rails from scratch, this time with agents in mind first. With $30 million freshly raised in a Series A round, the company enters the market ready to take on giants like Stripe and redefine what it means to make a payment in the age of artificial intelligence. 🚀
The real problem behind payments with AI agents
When you think about a modern AI agent, you probably picture something highly capable: it browses the internet, reads documents, sends emails, schedules meetings, and even makes complex decisions based on data. But there is a barrier that few people notice right away, and it stalls virtually any autonomous workflow that involves money.
Every time an agent needs to complete a financial transaction, it runs into systems that simply were not designed to deal with it. The friction is not a bug — it is a structural feature of a financial infrastructure that was born decades ago, in a world where humans were the only possible actors. Traditional systems like credit cards and ACH rely on human authorization for every transaction, which slows down any agent built to operate independently.
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This means that today, an agent that needs to pay for an external service, settle an invoice, or transfer funds between accounts inevitably depends on human intervention at some point in the process. Sometimes it is an SMS confirmation, sometimes it is a digital signature, sometimes it is just a login screen. For a human, these mechanisms make total sense as security layers. For an agent operating autonomously and at scale, each of those friction points is an interruption that breaks the flow, increases latency, and makes the entire operating model unworkable.
Where the idea for Natural came from
The story of Natural starts roughly a year before its launch, when cofounder and CEO Kahlil Lalji realized that AI agents were evolving faster than financial architecture could keep up. It became clear to him that current systems could not handle tasks like paying a supplier autonomously, receiving payments, or enabling agents to transact with each other.
Interestingly, Lalji did not want to go back to the financial sector. He has a background in banking and finance, but he was gearing up to launch a new startup specifically trying to get away from that space. His previous company, Ivella, a banking and financial product for couples backed by Y Combinator, was sold in 2023 to Earnin, where he worked as an engineer for two years. He told TechCrunch that he had been burned by the financial sector after the zero-interest-rate era came to an end.
Even so, he could not ignore the opportunity. In his own words, the topic kept coming back to him all the time because it seemed obvious that agent-driven payments would be, structurally, the most important problem in this new space. That conviction is what pushed him to move forward.
To bring the idea to life, Lalji teamed up with Eric Wang, his cofounder at Ivella, and Walt Leung, a former engineering manager at Nextdoor. Together, they founded Natural in 2025, positioning the company as an agent orchestration layer that allows AI agents to move and store funds. By integrating Natural’s infrastructure, companies can let their agents make autonomous payments, receive funds, and transact with both humans and other agents.
What Natural is building, exactly
Natural’s proposition is not about creating yet another digital wallet or an integration layer on top of what already exists. The idea is far more ambitious: building a financial infrastructure that is native to agents, from the ground up, with all the authorization, identity, and execution logic designed specifically for the behavior of artificial intelligence systems. This covers everything from how an agent authenticates itself to carry out a transaction to how spending limits are set, monitored, and dynamically adjusted as the context of an operation changes.
In practice, the startup offers a platform where AI agents can move money with well-defined permissions outlining what each agent can and cannot do. A procurement agent might have authorization to spend up to a certain amount per transaction, within specific supplier categories, with automatic approval rules for operations that fall outside that scope. All of this happens programmatically, without relying on a human to validate each step.
An interesting detail is that Natural does not just want to help agents pay and complete purchases on behalf of consumers. The company is also trying to reinvent the payment infrastructure itself, including how disputed transactions — meaning those where a conflict arises — are handled. This is a detail that tends to get overlooked, but it makes all the difference when you think about trust within an automated financial system.
The investment that caught the market’s attention
The $30 million Series A round was led by Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner of the venture capital firm Forerunner. Forerunner is known for focusing on consumer experiences and the future of commerce, and Green was drawn precisely to Natural’s broader ambitions. With this funding, the company’s total raised reached $40 million.
This kind of early-stage capital signals that the market is already recognizing the urgency of the problem — not as a future, speculative need, but as a present pain that real companies are feeling right now as they try to scale operations built on intelligent automation. And it is not just the money backing up the thesis: the startup’s mission has been attracting experienced professionals who have worked at fintech giants like Stripe, Ramp, and Square. 💡
Taking on Stripe is no small feat
Any company that enters the payments market with ambitions to scale will inevitably be compared to Stripe. And for good reason: Stripe is today one of the most robust and well-documented financial infrastructures in the world, with a massive developer base and integrations across virtually every relevant software ecosystem. Saying you are going to compete with Stripe is like saying you are going to compete with gravity. 😅
But Natural is not trying to be a better Stripe. The company is betting that Stripe, along with all the existing infrastructure, was optimized for a paradigm that is being surpassed. It is worth noting that Stripe itself is also racing to redesign its payment rails for AI agents, which shows that this contest is far from trivial.
Although Natural has only operated in beta so far, Lalji told TechCrunch that the startup has already made architectural decisions significant enough to give it a real shot at competing with the incumbents. His bet is that Natural’s development speed will allow it to outpace the established giants and build the infrastructure that will serve as the financial backbone for AI agents.
The race for autonomous payments
While Natural sees Stripe as its main competitor, it is not alone in this fight. Other startups, like Skyfire Systems, backed by DCVC, are also trying to reinvent the payments foundation for AI agents, using dollar-pegged stablecoins. Natural plans to incorporate stablecoins into its architecture but without giving up support for traditional bank payments, seeking a balance between innovation and compatibility with the current system.
And this is where the long-term vision gets really interesting. Lalji believes the entire market could grow massively if transactions start happening at computer speed rather than human speed. According to him, the number of payments that could occur worldwide might be two, three, or even four orders of magnitude greater than the number of payments happening today.
What is at stake here goes far beyond a startup carving out its space in the fintech market. If Natural’s thesis is correct — and there are good reasons to believe it is — we are at the beginning of a profound transformation in how payments work. A transformation where agents stop being dependent on humans to execute transactions and become full participants in the financial system, with their own identity, autonomy, and accountability. That changes virtually everything about how we think about money, authorization, and trust in the digital world.
