Natural, a US startup building a payments stack designed specifically for AI agents, has secured $30m in Series A funding as it races to position itself as the infrastructure layer for a world where software transacts on its own.
The round was led by Forerunner’s Kirsten Green and saw all of the company’s major backers return. Closed when Natural was just 193 days old, it lifts the firm’s total capital raised beyond $40m.
A long list of angels and operators also joined, including Human Capital founders Aarmaan Ali and Baris Akis, Abstract founder Ramtin Naimi, Wischoff Ventures founder Nichole Wischoff, Increase CEO Darragh Buckley, HappyRobot CEO Pablo Palafox, Browserbase CEO Paul Klein IV, Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari, Privy’s Henri Stern and Max Segall, Y Combinator GP Pete Koomen, Profound CTO Dylan Babbs, Brex CBO Art Levy, and Antifund GPs Jake and Logan Paul.
Natural’s thesis is that agents are turning into financial actors in their own right, holding funds, initiating and receiving payments, settling invoices, charging for their output, and operating across currencies, banking networks and payment rails. In its view, this demands financial plumbing purpose-built for machine behaviour rather than human workflows.
The company is developing 13 products in total, six of which have now reached general availability. These are Wallets, FDIC-insured accounts for agents; Vaults, one-way accounts that agents can pay into but never withdraw from; Pay, for sending funds to agents, businesses or consumers; Request, for collecting money from those same parties; Transfer, for moving balances between internal and external accounts; and Connect, which lets developers build platforms and marketplaces on top of Natural.
Three further products, Voice, Accept and Cards, will arrive over the coming months. Voice will let agents capture PCI data such as card details over the phone, Accept will turn agents into merchants, and Cards will allow firms to issue debit and charge cards to agents. A fourth wave is scheduled for Q4, comprising Charge for per-API-call billing on Natural wallets, Credit for issuing credit lines to agents, Direct for letting agents call specific payment rails at runtime, and Billing for success-based charging.
Natural stressed that it owns and operates its core primitives directly, spanning ledgering, money movement, multi-bank settlement, multi-currency support, fraud and compliance, and agent identity and observability, all built in under a year. Founded 342 days ago by Kahlil Lalji, Eric Wang and Walt Leung, the business now employs 17 people and is recruiting across every function.
Natural CEO and co-founder Kahlil Lalji said, “Agents are going to become one of the most, if not the most, important financial actors in the global economy. The question is not whether agents will move money. The question is who builds the infrastructure that makes agentic payments safe, reliable, compliant, and useful at scale. That is what we are building at Natural.”
Lalji said, “We made a bet on agentic payments a year ago, when no one was talking about it. We knew that we needed to own that entire stack. Natural builds and operates the primitives directly: ledgering, money movement, multi-bank settlement, multi-currency, fraud & compliance, agent identity & observability, and more.”
Lalji said, “We are moving with an unbelievable level of intensity because the market is moving extremely quickly. The shift from human-executed payments to agent-executed payments is already underway, and Natural is building the infrastructure required to support that shift.”
Stay ahead of where financial infrastructure is heading next. Subscribe to the FinTech Global newsletter for the strategic intelligence and early signals industry leaders rely on.
Copyright © 2026 FinTech Global
