Natural raises $30M to reinvent payments for AI agents

AI agents are starting to handle increasingly sophisticated tasks — identifying vendors, comparing prices, and messaging suppliers to arrange a delivery — but when it comes to actually paying for that shipment, a human still has to step in. Today’s financial rails, the infrastructure that moves money between banks, businesses, and consumers, were built for human-initiated transactions: both credit cards and ACH rely on human authorization, which slows down agents designed to work autonomously.

Natural is redesigning that system from the ground up, and it now has $30 million in fresh capital to pursue a plan that puts it in direct competition with giants like Stripe.

About a year ago, Natural co-founder and CEO Kahlil Lalji realized AI agents were evolving faster than the financial architecture underneath them — architecture that can’t support tasks like autonomously paying a vendor, collecting payments, or letting agents transact with each other. Lalji has a background in banking and finance but had hoped to avoid the sector for his next venture after being burned by it once the Zero Interest Rate Policy era ended. He couldn’t ignore the opportunity, he told TechCrunch.

Lalji teamed up with Eric Wang, his co-founder at his previous startup Ivella — a YC-backed banking product for couples that sold to Earnin in 2023 — and Walt Leung, a former engineering manager at Nextdoor, to found Natural in 2025. The startup positions itself as an agent-orchestration layer that lets AI agents move and store funds, enabling companies to allow their agents to make autonomous payments, collect funds, and transact with both humans and other agents.

Natural caught the attention of Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner at Forerunner, a VC firm focused on consumer experiences and the future of commerce. Green led the $30 million Series A, bringing Natural’s total funding to $40 million; she was drawn to the startup’s broader ambition to rebuild payment infrastructure — including how disputed transactions are handled — not just to power agent checkout.

Natural has operated in a beta trial until now. Lalji told TechCrunch the startup has made enough critical architectural decisions to give it strong odds against entrenched incumbents, and its mission has attracted senior staff who previously worked at Stripe, Ramp, and Square. Other startups, including DCVC-backed Skyfire Systems, are pursuing a similar goal using USD-backed stablecoins; Natural also plans to incorporate stablecoins while building support for traditional bank payments.

“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,” Lalji said, betting that the market could grow significantly once transactions happen at computer speed rather than human speed.

Why it matters

Natural’s raise underscores how quickly investors are betting on agentic commerce, setting up a race between well-funded startups and incumbents like Stripe to define the payment rails AI agents will run on.