Circle Co-Founder Raises $30 Million for Agentic-Driven Finance

Agentic artificial intelligence startup Catena Labs has raised $30 million as it seeks a banking charter.

The company, led by Circle Co-Founder Sean Neville, announced last week that the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) had accepted Catena’s filing for a national trust bank charter.

“We are building a regulated financial institution purpose-built for agents and their operators,” the company said in a post on LinkedIn. “Doing this right, and doing it through the front door, matters to us.”

In addition to the charter, Catena says it has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round led by Acrew Capital and Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z crypto.

“Catena is building the first AI-native financial institution: a banking platform for agents and the control plane for the humans and businesses who deploy them,” Acrew said in its announcement.

For agents, the announcement added, Catena offers verified identities, accounts, dollar balances, and the ability to send and receive payments across multiple rails. For the people and businesses behind those agents, Catena offers a “control plane,” letting them set policy, approve activity, put caps on spending and pause agent activity if something seems off.

In an interview with Fortune last week, Neville envisioned a day where the “majority, if not all initial transactions” would be handled by agents.

As that predicted future approaches, Catena, which raised $18 million in a funding round last May, told Fortune it is working on tools designed to reassure people that AI agents are handling their money properly.

“It’s very early days,” Neville said. “I think the main learning has been, as we evolved from thesis to reality and moving real money, is that giving an agent a wallet is pretty easy compared with giving a business a governed way to trust it.”

PYMNTS wrote earlier this month about evolution of agentic AI systems from “passive advisers into active economic participants,” and the shift that transition is revealing.

“Machines are beginning to transact on behalf of humans,” that report said. “And when artificial intelligence gets a wallet, the center of gravity in commerce moves decisively away from the checkout page toward an experience not shaped by better recommendations or more personalized ads, but by delegation.”

The new battleground, the report said, is not the moment of purchase. but the infrastructure governing how AI spends money. In this world, commerce markets like browsing, comparing and checkout could quickly fade into the periphery, replaced by a network of agentic AI systems that can coordinate economic activity on consumers’ behalf.

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