Circle Cofounder’s Catena Labs raises $18M for AI financial infra – CryptoTvplus
Sean Neville, a co-founder of Circle, has raised $18 million for his new venture, Catena Labs, an infrastructure startup designed to support a world where artificial intelligence—not humans—drives the majority of economic activity.
The funding round, announced this week, was led by a16z Crypto and Circle Ventures, with participation from CoinFund, CB Ventures, Pillar VC, and others. The goal is ambitious: to build a financial backbone fit for an AI-native economy, starting with programmable money, digital identity, and open-source developer tools.
Founded in 2024, Catena Labs aims to replace outdated financial systems with architecture tailored to autonomous software agents. These agents, already handling tasks from transaction execution to asset management, are becoming key players in modern enterprise systems. Neville believes the existing financial rails are too slow, expensive, and rigid for this transformation.
According to Catena, the architecture of current financial systems is not adaptive for the AI economy. This makes it difficult for the fast-growing AI economy to thrive.
Catena’s core technology includes the Agent Commerce Kit—an open-source stack for developers building agentic systems—as well as regulated stablecoin payments, primarily using Circle’s USDC. The platform also integrates digital identity frameworks, essential for enabling autonomous agents to interact in trusted financial environments.
The announcement comes amid rising investor interest in what’s being called the “agentic economy,” where AI tools act independently across sectors.
Since 2022, more than $2 billion has been poured into startups building these systems. In February 2025, Auditoria.AI raised $38 million to enhance its finance automation tools. Last year, companies like Emergence, Ema, Orby AI, Dust, Tezi, and Norm AI pulled in over $215 million combined.
The broader agentic AI market was valued at $5.1 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 44%, potentially reaching $150 billion by 2030. A PwC study estimates AI could contribute as much as $15.7 trillion to global GDP over the same period.
For Neville and his backers, Catena Labs represents a bet on this next economic phase—one where financial institutions will need to transact, verify, and interact with autonomous agents just as smoothly as they do with humans.