Natural lands $30M to build payments for AI agents

Natural has raised a $30 million Series A to build payment infrastructure for AI agents, betting that today’s financial rails are too slow and too human-dependent for software that is meant to act autonomously. The round was led by Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner of Forerunner, and brings the startup’s total funding to $40 million.

The pitch is straightforward: AI agents can already handle increasingly complex work, from finding freight vendors and comparing prices to messaging suppliers and organizing delivery. But when it is time to actually pay, they still usually need a human in the loop. According to co-founder and CEO Kahlil Lalji, that is because systems such as credit cards and ACH were built around human authorization, not autonomous transactions.

Lalji said he started thinking seriously about the problem about a year ago, after seeing AI agents outpace the financial infrastructure available to them. He previously co-founded Ivella, a Y Combinator-backed banking and finance startup for couples that was sold to Earnin in 2023. He then spent two years at Earnin as an engineer.

“I kept on coming back to it. It just feels obvious that agentic payments are going to be structurally the most important problem [in the] space.”

Lalji founded Natural in 2025 with Eric Wang, his co-founder at Ivella, and Walt Leung, a former engineering manager at Nextdoor. The company describes itself as an agent orchestration layer that lets AI agents move and store funds. Companies integrating Natural’s infrastructure can let agents make autonomous payments, collect funds, and transact with both humans and other agents.

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Forerunner’s Green said she was drawn not only to the idea of agents paying for goods on behalf of consumers, but also to Natural’s ambition to rethink payment infrastructure more broadly, including how disputed transactions are handled.

Natural has operated in beta so far, but Lalji told TechCrunch the company has now made enough core architectural decisions to give it a “good shot” at competing with incumbents such as Stripe, which is also working to redesign payment rails for AI agents. Natural is also hiring from major fintech players, including Stripe, Ramp, and Square.

The field is getting crowded. TechCrunch notes that startups including DCVC-backed Skyfire Systems are also building payment infrastructure for AI agents, often using USD-backed stablecoins. Natural plans to support stablecoins too, while also building for traditional bank payments.

Lalji’s bet is that if transactions move at computer speed instead of human speed, payment volume could increase dramatically.

“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.”