technology
Natural Raises $30 Million Series A for AI Agent Payment Infrastructure
Natural, a one-year-old startup founded in 2025, raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Forerunner's Kirsten Green. The funding brings its total to $40 million as it prepares to exit beta with tools that let AI agents move and store funds autonomously.
Jul 20, 3:11 PM·1m read1 source
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Natural raised a $30 million Series A round led by Kirsten Green of Forerunner, bringing its total funding to $40 million. The one-year-old startup, founded in 2025, has operated in beta until now and aims to create payment infrastructure that supports autonomous transactions by AI agents.
Co-founder and CEO Kahlil Lalji previously co-founded Ivella, a YC-backed banking product for couples that was sold to Earnin in 2023.
Lalji worked as an engineer at Earnin for two years afterward. He teamed up again with Ivella co-founder Eric Wang and former Nextdoor engineering manager Walt Leung to start Natural. The company positions itself as an agent orchestration layer that lets AI agents move and store funds.
It plans to support both stablecoins and traditional bank payments while redesigning elements such as dispute handling. Natural has hired senior staff who previously worked at Stripe, Ramp, and Square. Lalji said 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.
He added that agentic payments are going to be structurally the most important problem in the space. TechCrunch reported that Natural views Stripe as its main competitor while other startups explore stablecoin-based approaches.
