What happened
Natural, a startup founded in 2025 by Kahlil Lalji, Eric Wang, and Walt Leung, secured $30 million in Series A funding led by Forerunner Ventures, bringing its total capital to over $40 million. The company develops an agent orchestration layer, enabling AI agents to autonomously move, store, and transact funds. This infrastructure allows agents to make payments, collect funds, and interact with humans and other agents, aiming to replace traditional human-authorized payment systems. Natural plans to integrate both stablecoins and conventional bank payments, positioning itself to compete with incumbents like Stripe in redesigning financial rails for AI agents.
Why it matters
Autonomous agent transactions will scale payment volumes significantly, requiring new financial infrastructure. Natural's orchestration layer removes human authorization bottlenecks, enabling AI agents to execute payments and collections independently. CEO Kahlil Lalji projects payment volumes could increase two to four orders of magnitude if transactions occur at computer speed. For procurement teams and platform engineers deploying agentic workflows, this necessitates preparing for machine-driven financial operations and new reconciliation mechanisms. This follows Stripe's launch of AI Agent Wallet in April, indicating a broader industry shift towards agent-native payment solutions.
