Circle Co-Founder Launches Banking Platform for AI Agents
Catena Labs, led by Circle Co-Founder Sean Neville, raised $30 million in Series A funding and received approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to pursue a national trust bank charter.
The funding round was led by Acrew Capital and Andreessen Horowitz's a16z crypto. Catena previously raised $18 million last May.
What Catena Built
Catena is positioning itself as the first banking platform designed specifically for AI agents-autonomous systems that execute financial transactions on behalf of humans and businesses.
For agents, the platform provides verified identities, accounts, dollar balances, and payment capabilities across multiple payment rails. For the people and businesses deploying those agents, Catena offers a control plane that lets them set spending caps, approve activity, and pause agent operations if something appears wrong.
Neville told Fortune he expects a future where agents handle "the majority, if not all initial transactions."
The Governance Challenge
Building the technical infrastructure proved easier than solving the trust problem. "Giving an agent a wallet is pretty easy compared with giving a business a governed way to trust it," Neville said.
Catena is developing tools to help organizations monitor how AI agents spend money on their behalf. The company is moving real money through its systems and learning what governance structures actually work in practice.
A Shift in Commerce
As AI agents and automation systems take on more economic responsibility, the center of commerce is shifting. The critical battleground is no longer the checkout page but the infrastructure that governs how AI spends money.
Commerce functions like browsing and comparison shopping could fade as networks of AI agents coordinate spending on consumers' behalf. This requires new banking infrastructure built from the ground up to handle agent-driven transactions at scale.
For finance professionals, this represents a fundamental change in how payments, controls, and risk management operate. The regulatory path Catena is taking-seeking a banking charter-signals that AI for finance is moving from experimental to institutional.
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