Catena Labs, the agentic finance startup founded by Circle co-founder Sean Neville, has raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Acrew Capital and a16z crypto. The company has also filed for a national trust bank charter with the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), according to Fortune.
Additional investors in the round include Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, and QED. Catena previously raised $18 million in a seed round led by a16z crypto in May 2025, as Fortune reported.
The Product
Catena provides accounts, programmable payments, stablecoin settlement across ten blockchains, and yield on idle balances for autonomous AI agents. For the humans and businesses deploying those agents, the platform offers a control plane: spending limits, approved recipient lists, per-account balance caps, and the ability to pause agent activity.
“The majority, if not all initial transactions, will be executed by agents,” Neville told Fortune.
The OCC charter filing signals that Catena intends to operate as a regulated financial institution rather than routing through existing banking-as-a-service providers. “We are building a regulated financial institution purpose-built for agents and their operators,” the company said in a LinkedIn post cited by PYMNTS. “Doing this right, and doing it through the front door, matters to us.”
Agent Transactions Are Already Happening
The raise arrives as agent-driven financial activity moves from theory to measurable volume. A Keyrock report published earlier this month documented $73 million in AI agent transactions across 176 million settlements over 12 months, with 76% of those transactions falling below Visa’s $0.30 fee floor, forcing a shift toward stablecoin rails. Catena’s stablecoin-native architecture is designed precisely for that transaction profile.
“It’s very early days,” Neville told Fortune. “I think the main learning has been, as we evolved from thesis to reality and moving real money, is that giving an agent a wallet is pretty easy compared with giving a business a governed way to trust it.”
The Governance Bet
Acrew Capital founding partner Lauren Kolodny framed the opportunity around trust infrastructure rather than payments alone. “The opportunity to come up with the framework by which agents can make financial transactions on behalf of humans and businesses is obviously a huge one,” Kolodny told Fortune.
That framing positions Catena less as a payment processor and more as a governance layer for agent financial activity. The company currently has 11 employees and is hiring, per Neville’s comments to Fortune. The invite-only platform is live.