Key Takeaways:
Natural's $30 million Series A funds a bet that AI agents need their own payment infrastructure — and that Stripe's existing rails won't cut it.
Natural is building payment infrastructure from scratch for AI agents — a market it says could generate "two or three or four orders of magnitude" more transactions than today's human-driven economy.
"Agentic payments are going to be structurally the most important problem in the space," Kahlil Lalji, co-founder and chief executive officer of Natural, said. Lalji previously sold his YC-backed banking startup Ivella to Earnin in 2023.
The startup raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Forerunner's Kirsten Green, bringing total funding to $40 million. Natural's infrastructure lets AI agents autonomously pay vendors, collect funds, and transact with both humans and other agents — tasks that today's financial rails, designed for human authorization, cannot support at machine speed.
The bet puts Natural in direct competition with Stripe, which is also racing to redesign payment rails for AI agents. Natural has attracted senior engineers from Stripe, Ramp, and Square, and is building support for both traditional bank payments and stablecoins — a dual-track approach that distinguishes it from rival Skyfire Systems, which relies solely on USD-backed stablecoins.
Today's payment infrastructure was built for human-initiated transactions. Credit cards and ACH transfers require manual authorization, creating a bottleneck for AI agents engineered to operate autonomously. Natural positions itself as an "agent orchestration layer" that handles the entire payment lifecycle — moving funds, storing them, and resolving disputes — without human intervention.
Lalji co-founded Natural in 2025 with Eric Wang, his co-founder at Ivella, and Walt Leung, a former engineering manager at Nextdoor. The startup has operated in beta until now, but Lalji told TechCrunch that critical architectural decisions give it a "good shot" at competing with incumbents. Natural plans to incorporate stablecoins into its architecture while also supporting traditional bank payments, giving it flexibility across both crypto-native and conventional financial systems.
Forerunner's Green was attracted by Natural's broader ambitions beyond simple checkout automation. The startup is also trying to reinvent how disputed transactions are handled in an agent-to-agent economy — a problem that existing chargeback systems, designed for human consumers, are ill-equipped to solve.
The market opportunity is enormous if Lalji's thesis holds. Stripe processed more than $1 trillion in payment volume in 2024, but virtually all of it was initiated by humans. If AI agents begin transacting at computer speed rather than human speed, the total addressable market for payment infrastructure could expand by orders of magnitude. Natural's $40 million in total funding is a fraction of Stripe's $70 billion valuation, but the startup is betting that speed of execution — not balance sheet size — will determine who wins the agent payments vertical.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
