AI payments startup Natural raises $30 million to create autonomous agent transaction infrastructure

AI‑focused fintech startup Natural announced a $30 million Series A financing round, bringing its total funding to $40 million. The round was led by Forerunner Ventures with participation from investors who previously worked at Stripe, Ramp and Square.

Founded by Kahlil Lalji, who previously built the banking app Ivella, and co‑founders Eric Wang and Walt Leung, Natural aims to redesign the payment stack so that AI agents can execute payments, receive funds, settle disputes and transact with other agents without human approval. Lalji explained that current payment rails—credit cards, ACH transfers and similar systems—were built for person‑initiated transactions and require manual authorisation, creating a bottleneck for autonomous software.

Natural’s platform will provide an orchestration layer that lets AI agents handle supplier payments, customer billing and inter‑agent transfers at computer speed. The company predicts that such “agentic” payments could be up to a thousand times more frequent than today’s human‑mediated transactions, positioning Natural to compete directly with incumbents such as Stripe.