Natural raises $30M to reinvent payments for AI agents — and take on Stripe

Natural, a startup building payment infrastructure specifically for autonomous AI agents, has raised a $30 million Series A led by Forerunner Ventures, bringing its total funding to $40 million as it positions itself as a direct challenger to Stripe in a payments category that barely existed two years ago.

Payments built for agents, not humans

Natural's core bet is that today's payment infrastructure, built around the assumption that a human is always the one authorizing a transaction, will not scale to a world where AI agents increasingly transact on their own — making purchases, collecting payments, and settling with both humans and other agents without a person clicking "confirm" at each step.

The company's platform functions as an orchestration layer that gives agents the ability to move money independently, a capability co-founder and CEO Kahlil Lalji described as an obvious and inevitable infrastructure gap: "I kept on coming back to it. It just feels obvious that agentic payments are going to be structurally the most important problem [in the] space."

Founders with fintech pedigree

Lalji previously founded Ivella, a YC-backed banking product built for couples that was acquired by Earnin in 2023. He co-founded Natural, established in 2025, alongside Eric Wang, his Ivella co-founder, and Walt Leung, a former engineering manager at Nextdoor — a team with direct experience building consumer financial products before pivoting to infrastructure aimed at machines rather than people.

A market Natural believes will dwarf today's

Lalji's pitch to investors rests on a striking scale argument: as AI agents proliferate and begin handling more of the transactional work currently done by humans, the sheer number of individual payment events could grow by orders of magnitude. "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 said, framing agentic commerce not as a niche use case but as a fundamental expansion of the payments market itself.

Competing directly with Stripe

Natural has explicitly named Stripe as its primary competitor, a bold positioning choice given Stripe's dominance in the broader payments infrastructure space. The company isn't alone in targeting this niche, however — Skyfire Systems is pursuing a similar vision using USD-backed stablecoins rather than Natural's own orchestration approach, suggesting investors see enough of a market opening here to fund multiple competing bets on how agent-to-agent and agent-to-human payments should actually work at scale.

The unresolved trust problem

Underlying all of this is a question the industry has yet to fully answer: how much financial autonomy should be handed to a system that isn't a person, especially when things go wrong. Giving an AI agent the ability to spend money independently raises obvious risk-management questions — around fraud, runaway spending, and accountability when an agent makes a purchase a human would not have authorized — that Natural and its competitors will need to solve convincingly for banks, card networks, and enterprise customers before agentic payments can move from pilot programs to the kind of default infrastructure Lalji envisions displacing Stripe with.

Forerunner Ventures' decision to lead the round is notable given the firm's long-standing focus on consumer-facing commerce and fintech rather than deep infrastructure plays, suggesting Kirsten Green and her partners see agentic commerce as a natural extension of consumer spending patterns rather than a purely back-end technical shift — a bet that the way people (and increasingly their software agents) actually pay for things is about to change as fundamentally as it did with the shift from cash to cards, and later to mobile wallets.