Exclusive: Circle cofounder raises $30M Series A for AI-native bank Catena Labs

(SeaPRwire) –   Sean Neville, co-founder of stablecoin behemoth Circle, has secured a fresh pool of funding from leading venture capital firms. His startup Catena Labs, which develops solutions that enable AI agents to carry out financial transactions securely, revealed on Wednesday that it has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Acrew Capital and the crypto division of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z crypto).

Neville declined to disclose the valuation at which he raised capital for his latest venture, which pulled in an initial $18 million round led by a16z crypto in 2025. Additional investors participating in this recent fundraise include Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, and QED.

Also on Wednesday, Catena Labs announced that it is applying for a national trust bank charter in New York through the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, as the company pursues regulatory approval to process payments and hold customer funds.

“Most, if not all of the early transactions, will be carried out by agents,” Neville predicted during an interview with .

Agentic finance

Neville, who remains on Circle’s board of directors, is not the only founder arguing that AI will play a major role in the payments space. Agentic finance has become a popular buzzword in fintech, as major players including Stripe and Visa project that in the near future, people will assign bots to order groceries for them, pay subscription fees on their behalf, or transfer funds between their bank accounts.

“The opportunity to develop the framework that allows agents to complete financial transactions on behalf of individuals and businesses is clearly enormous,” Lauren Kolodny, founding partner at Acrew Capital, told .

That future has not yet become a reality, but Neville and his co-founder Matt Venables, a former executive at Circle, believe it is close enough to justify building a full suite of tools that give users confidence their AI agents are handling funds safely and accurately.

“We are still in very early days,” said Neville. “I think the key takeaway as we moved from theoretical thesis to real-world implementation with actual fund transfers, is that giving an agent a wallet is fairly simple compared to creating a structured, compliant system that businesses can trust.”

When he first unveiled Catena Labs in 2025, Neville was vague about how exactly his startup was building an “AI-native bank.” Now, he and his 11-person team have finalized a clearer set of offerings. Catena Labs has rolled out invite-only access to its platform, which lets users set guardrails for how their AI surrogates transfer money. These rules include spending limits, approved recipients for AI agent payments, and the maximum balance each user’s bank account can hold at any given time.

Even so, Neville does not believe AI can handle every task. When asked how he plans to allocate the newly raised capital, he said, “We are hiring humans.”