AI agents are already handling tasks that once required a human hand—identifying freight vendors, comparing prices, and even arranging deliveries. Yet when it comes time to pay, the agents still have to hand the transaction off to a person because today’s financial rails—credit cards, ACH, and the like—were built for human‑initiated moves. Natural, a fintech startup founded in 2025, is tackling that bottleneck by rebuilding the payment infrastructure from the ground up.
Co‑founder and CEO Kahlil Lalji saw the gap a year ago when he realized that autonomous agents were outpacing the systems meant to support them. Lalji, who previously launched the YC‑backed banking app Ivella and later worked at Earnin after Ivella’s 2023 sale, says he “kept on coming back” to the problem despite a rocky experience in the finance sector. He teamed up with former Ivella partner Eric Wang and Walt Leung, a former engineering manager at Nextdoor, to create Natural as an agent‑orchestration layer that lets AI agents move, store, and receive funds on their own.
The startup just announced a $30 million Series A round, led by Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner of Forerunner. The infusion lifts Natural’s total capital to $40 million. Green’s firm, known for betting on consumer‑focused commerce, was drawn to Natural’s ambition to not only enable agents to checkout on behalf of users but also to overhaul how disputed transactions are resolved. The funding will accelerate development of both traditional bank‑payment support and USD‑backed stablecoin integration.
Natural has already run a beta trial and, according to Lalji, has made enough architectural decisions to give it “a good shot” at competing with entrenched players like Stripe. The company has recruited senior engineers from Stripe, Ramp, and Square, underscoring its intent to move quickly. While Stripe is also rethinking its rails for AI, Natural believes its speed and focus on an agent‑first design will let it capture a sizable share of a market that could expand dramatically.
Other startups are eyeing the same space. DCVC‑backed Skyfire Systems, for example, is building a stablecoin‑based payments backbone for AI agents. Natural, however, is keeping its options open by supporting both stablecoins and conventional banking methods, aiming to be the financial backbone for any autonomous transaction, whether it settles on a blockchain or through a legacy bank network.
Lalji predicts that once payments can occur at computer speed, the volume of transactions could grow by two to four orders of magnitude. “The number of payments that may occur in the world may be two or three or four orders of magnitude greater than the number of payments that exist today,” he told TechCrunch. If that forecast holds, Natural’s infrastructure could become a critical layer for everything from e‑commerce bots to supply‑chain automation.
Natural’s next milestones include expanding its beta to more enterprise partners, finalizing stablecoin support, and rolling out APIs that let developers embed autonomous payment capabilities directly into their AI products. With fresh capital and a seasoned team, the startup is poised to test whether a payments system built for machines can outpace the legacy networks that have dominated finance for decades.
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