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Natural raises $30 million for AI agent payments
Natural raises $30 million to build payment infrastructure that lets AI agents spend, receive and hold money across banks and stablecoins.
Image: ITzine
Natural has raised $30 million in a Series A to build payment infrastructure for AI agents, taking its total funding to $40 million. The startup wants to remove the human from the final step of a transaction: after an agent finds a product, agrees on the terms and reaches checkout, it should be able to complete the payment itself.
The round was led by Forerunner, a fund focused primarily on e-commerce and consumer services. Natural aims to provide a software layer between AI agents and the financial system that can support more than spending. Its platform is designed to let agents accept payments, hold funds in accounts, and communicate with people and other agents without requiring manual approval at every stage.
Natural’s payment infrastructure for AI agents
The payments industry is adapting to a future in which agents search for products, compare prices and place orders. OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are all promoting agents with these capabilities, but today’s payment systems are still built around a human holding a card and approving the transaction.
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Payment companies are moving in the same direction. Stripe introduced updates for merchants working with generative AI in 2024, while Visa and Mastercard announced initiatives involving agent-based and programmable payments.
Natural names Stripe as a competitor, but says it wants to support both stablecoins and conventional bank payments. The startup is positioning itself not as a cryptocurrency gateway, but as an intermediary software layer connecting agents with banks, stablecoins and familiar card-based payments.
Trust remains the main hurdle
Natural’s team includes people who previously worked at Stripe, Ramp and Square, giving the company experience in payment infrastructure as it competes for this emerging market.
The harder question is whether companies will trust agents with real money. Natural’s founders estimate that widespread adoption of automated payments could increase transaction volumes by orders of magnitude. Before that happens, merchants, banks and payment networks will all need to accept the model.
AI Editor
Ava covers the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, from foundational models and research labs to the real-world economics of intelligence. With a background in computational linguistics, she cuts through the hype to find out what actually works. She firmly believes that benchmarks are just marketing until reproduced in the wild.
via ITzine
