Circle Co-Founder’s Catena Labs Raises $30 Million to Build a Bank for AI Agents

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Sean Neville, who co-founded the stablecoin company Circle, has pulled in another round of capital from prominent venture investors. His startup Catena Labs, which builds tools that let AI agents conduct financial transactions safely, said on Wednesday that it had secured $30 million in a Series A round led by Acrew Capital and the crypto arm of Andreessen Horowitz, a16z crypto.

Neville declined to say at what valuation he raised the money. The company had previously closed an initial round of $18 million led by a16z crypto in 2025. Other participants in the more recent raise include Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, and QED.

Catena Labs also announced that it is applying for a national trust bank charter in New York from the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, seeking regulatory backing to process payments and hold customers’ money.

Neville, who still sits on Circle’s board, is not alone in betting that AI will play a major role in payments. Agentic finance has become a common theme in fintech, with companies like Stripe and Visa predicting that, before long, people will hand bots tasks like ordering groceries, paying for subscriptions, or moving money between bank accounts. That future has not arrived yet, but Neville and his co-founder Matt Venables, a former Circle executive, believe it is close enough to justify building a set of tools that give people confidence their AI agents are handling money correctly.

When Catena Labs first surfaced in 2025, Neville was vague about exactly how the startup was building an AI-native bank. Now he and his team of 11 employees have landed on a clearer set of offerings. The company has opened invite-only access to its platform, which lets people set the guardrails for how their AI surrogates move money, including spending limits, who the agents are allowed to pay, and how much cash each user’s account can hold at one time. Neville said the new capital is going partly toward hiring more people.