On May 20, Circle co-founder Sean Neville announced that his new project Catena Labs successfully completed an $18 million seed round of financing.

This round of financing was led by a16z Crypto, followed by Breyer Capital, Coinbase Ventures, and former club Circle Ventures, as well as football star Tom Brady.

Chris Dixon, founder and managing partner of a16z crypto, said: "Sean Neville and the Catena team have the expertise to address this challenge. They are building financial infrastructure that agency commerce can rely on, and we are excited to support their vision."

AI also wants to open a bank?

Catena Labs is a fintech startup that wants to "build an AI bank from scratch". It focuses on providing exclusive financial infrastructure for AI agents, such as smart payments, identity authentication, low-cost settlement, etc. The company plans to establish the first fully regulated AI-native financial institution.

Traditional payment rails assume there is a human on one end of every transaction, which means delays like 3-day ACH transfers, and high fees (up to 3%) for credit card payments.

All current traditional financial systems are still at the stage of "people serving people", and the system also marks automated activities as fraud, forcing manual review. This slows down innovation and limits the actual functions of AI agents.

What Catena wants to do is "AI serving AI", so that your AI assistant can directly help you open an account, transfer money, manage finances, and even negotiate business with other AIs. Software agents should be able to pay and get paid instantly and securely.

It is in the field of AI + Fintech, with a focus on AI-driven financial services and decentralized identity. This field is currently being pursued crazily by big capital.

From USDC to AI Bank, Circle founder makes a second move

Catena Labs was founded by Circle co-founder Sean Neville. It was originally established in 2021 to explore AI and decentralized identity, and in 2023 it officially focused on building an "AI-native financial system."

Neville was a former Adobe engineer and co-founder of Circle Internet Group, Inc. He led the design and development of USDC. In April 2025, Circle submitted an IPO application with a valuation of approximately US$5 billion.

Neville left Circle's operational role in early 2020, but remained a member of Circle's board of directors. After leaving Circle, he began to focus on AI and firmly believed that we are entering the AI-native Internet era, which also became the philosophical basis of Catena Labs.

In 2021, Neville and Matt Venables (co-founder and CTO of Catena Labs) co-founded a technology experimental studio to explore emerging technologies such as AI and decentralized identity, which is the origin of Catena Labs.

Currently, Catena Labs has only 9 members, all of whom are from world-class teams from Meta, Google, Jump Crypto and Protocol Labs. Resumes can be submitted directly on its official website, which shows that the team is also actively recruiting talents from around the world.

Currently, Catena Labs has developed an open source protocol that allows AI to become the user's "bank representative". The company has made it clear that it will not issue cryptocurrencies or stablecoins for the time being, but investors will receive equity with token warrants.

Reinstalling the financial system with AI

Jim Breyer, founder and CEO of Breyer Capital, said: “Neville is uniquely qualified to lead the creation of the first AI-native bank. Integrating AI into business requires rebuilding financial infrastructure. Legacy systems haven’t always kept up, which is what makes Catena so compelling.

Neville also predicts that financial transactions in the future will be completely executed by AI agents. The project team also hopes that in the future AI will not only chat and draw pictures, but will also be able to truly "make money, spend money, and manage finances" and become an independent participant in the economic system.

Catena Labs has not issued a coin or launched any products yet, but they have just open-sourced Agent Commerce Kit (ACK), a financial protocol framework designed specifically for AI that focuses on two key words: identity authentication and automatic payment for AI agents.

Catena Labs wants to solve the various unfriendly aspects of traditional finance to AI: slow payment, high cost, and unsuitable for automation. ACK is their first step: using stablecoins to achieve fast settlement and using standardized protocols for identity verification, so that AI can eventually have its own "bank account" and "financial services" like humans.

At present, they have not announced specific product plans, only saying that they will open up access to developers and enterprises through APIs in the future to build a new AI-driven financial ecosystem. Although it is still under development, judging from the direction of the ACK framework, their goal is to rewrite the underlying logic of the entire financial system with AI.

Summarize

Catena Labs is an early-stage project with great potential, located in the hot track where AI and financial technology intersect. Founders Sean Neville and Matt Venables, with their successful experience at Circle and USDC, led a team of only 9 people to complete an $18 million seed round of financing led by a16z.

Its AI-native vision, open source protocol (ACK), and flexible integration of stablecoins demonstrate industry foresight. Although no specific products have been launched yet, its strong financing background and industry support make it significantly competitive in the field of AI-driven finance.

In the future, Catena Labs’ development will depend on the speed at which its products are put into use and the effectiveness of its ecosystem construction.