Kahlil Lalji, the CEO, and his co-founders Eric Wang and Walt Leung want to create a payment system built for machines, not people. Right now, if an AI agent needs to pay for something, a human has to step in and approve the transaction. That defeats the point of having an autonomous agent.
Natural's system lets these agents pay, collect money, and exchange funds with both humans and other agents, all without a person clicking "confirm." Lalji and Wang previously started Ivella, a banking product for couples that sold to Earnin in 2023. Leung was a former engineering manager at Nextdoor. The rest of the team has worked at Stripe, Ramp, and Square.
The $30 million round was led by Forerunner, the venture firm run by Kirsten Green. That brings Natural's total funding to $40 million.
The problem is simple. The existing financial infrastructure, from credit cards to ACH transfers, was created under the assumption that a human must authorize each individual payment. AI agents operate at computer speed.
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If every decision requires a human to stop, look, and approve, the whole system slows down. Lalji estimates the total number of payments in the world could grow by "two or three or four orders of magnitude" if they can happen at machine speed instead of human speed. That explains why Natural is moving fast to build this infrastructure.
Natural is not the only company chasing this idea. Stripe, the giant of online payments, is also building payment rails for AI agents. Another startup called Skyfire Systems, backed by DCVC, is working on a payment backbone that uses stablecoins.
Lalji says Natural has a "good shot" at competing with incumbents. The startup intends to integrate stablecoins into its system design, and it is also developing compatibility with conventional bank payments, so agents can work across different types of money.
For investors, the AI agent economy is just starting to take shape. Lalji believes that processing transactions at machine velocity instead of human pace could massively enlarge the overall market.
The push for agentic payments comes as AI assistants increasingly handle tasks like booking travel, ordering supplies, or managing subscriptions. Without automated payment rails, every microtransaction currently needs a human thumb on the scale, which limits the potential for fully autonomous workflows. Natural's infrastructure aims to remove that bottleneck, allowing software agents to negotiate and settle payments in milliseconds.
This could unlock new business models where machines trade services with other machines - for example, an AI content generator paying an AI image generator per use, or a logistics agent paying a warehouse robot for time slots. As more companies deploy autonomous agents, the demand for machine-native payment systems will likely grow. Natural is positioning itself to capture that shift, betting that the future of commerce will be mediated not by people pulling out wallets, but by software calling APIs to settle accounts.
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