Every era of technology eventually runs into the same wall: capability races ahead of infrastructure. The internet could move information long before it could safely move money, creating an entire generation of companies that closed the gap. We believe we're at that moment again. Except this time the thing racing is the agent.
We're proud to lead Natural's Series A and back Kahlil, Eric, Walt, and the entire team as they formally launch today.
The Capability Is Here. The Infrastructure Is Not.
AI agents can already reason, plan, negotiate, and run multi-step workflows on behalf of people and companies. But then they stop, and hand it back over. The moment money has to move, a human needs to step back in.
Every payment system in use today was built on a single assumption: a person initiates the transaction. They weren't built around agent identity, delegated authority, persistent balances, or autonomous financial operations that remain auditable without a human in the loop. Agents break the assumption the whole stack was built on, so the infrastructure underneath them has to be rebuilt, not adapted.
AI agents can already reason, plan, negotiate, and run multi-step workflows on behalf of people and companies. Natural is building the rails to support this money movement, launching with six products spanning wallets, payments, money movement, usage-based billing, credit, and compliance, with ACH, wire, RTP, and stablecoins built in. The platform is already live in production, moving real money.
Where We Think Value Accrues
When looking at this opportunity, we spent time investigating where value lies once the category matures. We see three layers.
First, the system of record: the ledger and custody abstraction that defines where money lives and how it moves. This is where switching costs and data advantages compound, and it's the layer Natural is building itself around by owning the state of the ledger rather than routing on top of someone else's.
Second, the trust and liability layer: delegation, approvals, audit trails, dispute handling, and the policy tied to agent identity. This layer determines what an agent is allowed to do, under what constraints, and who is accountable if something goes wrong.
Third, credit and balance-sheet products. Payments alone tend to be low-margin; once a platform owns balances, transaction history, and policy enforcement across a large developer base, it becomes the natural underwriter for working capital, advances, and net terms.
Plenty of others are circling this problem — card-native wrappers, stablecoin-native networks, incumbents extending checkout outward from the card rail. Natural's bet is to own the ledger itself, rather than sitting on top of someone else's, becoming the system enterprises are accountable to.
The Team
Kahlil (CEO) and Eric (CTO) previously co-founded a company together that was acquired by EarnIn, and by every reference we ran, their partnership is the real asset: Kahlil throttles the company’s ambition and obsesses over product and customers to a degree described by references as “borderline extreme” while Eric is the pragmatic counterweight who sets steadfast expectations and isn't afraid to kill an idea that isn't working.
Walt (CPO) was the youngest staff engineering manager at Nextdoor through its IPO. Their senior compliance leaders spent many years at Stripe, bringing institutional depth to a business where the compliance and regulatory build is arguably as hard as the product build. Their product engineering leadership previously built payments at Ramp.
In an increasingly competitive race for talent, Natural’s early hires suggest it’s a gravity well for the best talent in fintech. They've hired an all-star team across regulatory, design, engineering, and product, steeped in fintech expertise. The team is as competitive and hungry to win as they come.
Why We're In
Judged against everything we've learned backing companies through technology shifts, Natural is one of the clearest fits we've seen for this one: a real break in how the world works, a new behavior waiting on the other side of it, and a team with the depth and judgment to build the trusted layer underneath it.
We think the next decade of the internet will be defined by agents that can actually do things, not just suggest them. We think the line between those two worlds runs straight through payments. And we're backing Natural to build the rail that lets agents cross it.
