Your AI agent can research a vendor, haggle the price, and draft the contract — then it reaches "pay," and everything stops. Every payment system ever built assumes a human is clicking the button. Natural is rebuilding money so your agent doesn't need one. Let's check them out…
Hand today's AI agents a job and they'll sprint — right up until money is involved. Cards, ACH, and checkout pages were all built around a person tapping "confirm," and the fraud models behind them are trained to flag anything automated as suspicious. So the agent economy has a plumbing problem: the bots can decide to spend, but they have nowhere of their own to hold cash and no compliant way to move it.
That's the gap Natural is filling. Founded in 2025 by Kahlil Lalji and Eric Wang — who earlier built the YC-backed couples-banking startup Ivella together — plus ex-Nextdoor engineering manager Walt Leung, Natural gives every agent its own FDIC-insured wallet, an identity that ties every dollar back to a real legal entity, and one API to send, request, and settle money. In July 2026 it raised a $30M Series A led by Forerunner's Kirsten Green at a reported $150M valuation — roughly 193 days after coming out of stealth.
🌐 Website: natural.com
📅 Founded: 2025 (San Francisco, ~17-person team)
👥 Founders: Kahlil Lalji (CEO), Eric Wang (CTO), Walt Leung (CPO)
💰 Stage: $30M Series A led by Forerunner — ~$40M+ total raised at a reported $150M valuation
💸 Backers: the CEOs/founders of Mercury, Ramp, Brex, Vercel and Notion, YC's Pete Koomen — and online personalities like Jake & Logan Paul
📈 Traction: 6 of 13 products live; $50M+ in insured balances and 99.99% uptime (company-reported); in beta
🏦 Under the hood: FDIC-insured wallets via Column N.A.; access over MCP, CLI, SDK + API
🔮 Tech Trend: Agentic payments / agentic commerce
🎯 Target Market: developers building AI agents that need to move money
📈 The rails are being poured right now: The agentic-commerce market is projected to grow from $5.7B in 2025 to $65.5B by 2033 (a 35.7% CAGR), and McKinsey figures agents could orchestrate $3–5 trillion in commerce by 2030. Everyone from Stripe to Mastercard is racing to define how bots pay — and Natural is building the bank account underneath it all.
👫 Founders who've shipped fintech before: Lalji and Wang already built and sold a banking product (Ivella was acqui-hired into EarnIn), Leung scaled infrastructure at Nextdoor, and they've since pulled in operators from Stripe, Ramp, and Square. The backer list — Mercury's Immad Akhund, Ramp's founders, Vercel's Guillermo Rauch — reads like a who's-who of people who know payments plumbing.
🏗️ They own the whole stack, not a wrapper: Instead of reselling someone else's rails, Natural runs its own ledgering, multi-bank settlement, agent identity, and even dispute mediation built for machine transactions. The challenge will be distribution and law: Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard already own the merchants, who's liable when an agent misfires is legally unsettled, and all those insured deposits currently ride on a single partner bank. Owning the stack is the moat — and the risk.
📱 Spin up an agent wallet or browse the developer docs
🧑💻 Plug it into Claude, Cursor, or ChatGPT via their MCP server
💼 They're hiring in San Francisco as they build out the remaining products
📰 Read the TechCrunch story on the $30M raise
🐦 Follow CEO Kahlil Lalji on X
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.