Revolutionizing Payments: Natural's $30M Quest to Transform AI Transactions

TL;DR

• **Natural secured $30 million in Series A funding**, led by Forerunner Ventures' Kirsten Green, bringing its total capital to approximately $40 million.
• **The startup aims to displace Stripe** by building a payment infrastructure specifically designed for autonomous AI agents to move, store, and transact funds without human approval.
• **Founded in late 2025 by Kahlil Lalji, Eric Wang, and Walt Leung**, the San Francisco-based company is already integrating fintech talent from Stripe, Ramp, and Square to scale its agent orchestration layer.

The $30 Million Bet on Autonomous Commerce

The financial infrastructure built for human consumers is fundamentally ill-equipped for the emerging era of AI agents. While artificial intelligence can now manage procurement, sales, and complex workflows, the moment money needs to move, the process typically halts, requiring a human to step in and execute the payment. This bottleneck is the core problem Natural, a new San Francisco startup, is solving with a recent $30 million Series A funding round.

A New Infrastructure for AI Agents

Natural positions itself not just as a payment processor, but as an "agent orchestration layer" that enables AI agents to autonomously move and store funds. By integrating Natural’s infrastructure, companies can allow their agents to make payments, collect funds, and transact with both humans and other agents without human intervention.

The startup is building a stack of financial primitives—including wallets, payments, ledgering, routing, identity, and compliance—specifically designed so that autonomous software can hold funds, get authorized, and send money. This approach addresses critical questions regarding identity, permissions, and accountability in AI-driven financial transactions. Unlike conventional checkout flows designed for humans clicking buttons, Natural’s model is engineered from the ground up for an agentic future where AI systems handle a significant portion of global transaction volume.

Competing with Stripe and Reshaping the Market

Natural’s ambition is to directly compete with established giants like Stripe, which currently dominates the payment processing landscape for humans. The startup believes that current payment rails are too fragmented and human-centric for the speed required by autonomous agents.

To achieve this, Natural aims to reinvent how disputed transactions are handled and build the financial backbone for AI agents. The company plans to leverage existing rails like ACH while also consolidating workflows into machine-accessible protocols, with an eye toward supporting diverse counterparty preferences ranging from traditional bank transfers to stablecoins. Founder Kahlil Lalji predicts that transaction volumes will explode once these human bottlenecks are removed.

Leadership and Rapid Growth

The company was founded in August 2025 by Kahlil Lalji (CEO), Eric Wang (CTO), and Walt Leung (CPO), who previously worked together at Ivella and Nextdoor. Despite being a relatively new entity, Natural has moved quickly, emerging from stealth in October 2025 with a $9.8 million seed round co-led by Abstract and Human Capital.

The newly announced $30 million Series A was led by Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures, with continued participation from all major investors, including Terrain, Restive Ventures, and Genius Ventures. This round brings Natural’s total funding to approximately $40 million and places the company at a reported $150 million post-money valuation. To scale its operations, the team has recruited fintech professionals from Stripe, Ramp, and Square, signaling a serious intent to become a major player in the agent-driven payments space.

The Vision for Machine-Led Commerce

The ultimate goal of Natural is to create "controllable wallets" that allow businesses to set granular spending limits and liquidity for their agents, ensuring safety while maintaining speed. The platform includes real-time authorization tools designed to mirror or exceed the speed of credit card networks, which is crucial for synchronous agent-to-agent transactions.

By eliminating the pause where a human must approve a transaction, Natural aims to enable a world where software—not people—is the primary mover of money. As Lalji notes, while agents can manage complex workflows, "the second money needs to move, the workflow breaks" without a dedicated infrastructure. Natural’s fast development speed is intended to allow it to outpace established giants and build the payment infrastructure necessary for the future of autonomous AI transactions.

AndroGuider Team

Articles written by the AndroGuider team. We try to make them thorough and informational while being easy to read.