Catena: The Financial Backbone for the New Economy
By Lauren Kolodny, Maitree Mervana Parekh
Sean Neville and Matt Venables spent close to a decade building one of the most important pieces of financial infrastructure of our generation. Together at Circle, they helped invent USDC, the dollar stablecoin that has moved more than $80 trillion across the internet. Sean co-founded Circle and architected the protocol. Matt led engineering and helped drive the product launch. It’s the kind of thing most operators in fintech only get to study from the outside.
So, when we learned what they were building next at Catena Labs, we paid close attention.
Here is the short version. AI agents are about to do real work in the real economy. Not assistants helping humans work faster. Actual economic actors that hold funds, execute payments, and operate on behalf of the businesses that deploy them. But to do any of that, an agent has to be able to pay for things, get paid for things, and prove who it is on the other end of a transaction. The financial system we have today does almost none of that. It assumes a human on the other end: someone who logs in, verifies a purchase, authenticates an account. That assumption breaks completely when the transacting entity is an autonomous system operating at machine speed, at machine scale, around the clock. It treats automated traffic as fraud until proven otherwise. Settlement still happens on human timescales.
At Acrew, as part of thesis-driven approach to investing, we’ve been paying close attention to the convergence of two massive shifts: the dollar going internet-native via stablecoins, and the internet itself going agent-native via AI. We’re just at the cusp of understanding what’s possible for agents, during what we would argue is the biggest technological shift of our generation. Historically, every technology wave has also created new demands on the financial system: new payment flows, new fraud models, new compliance regimes, new infrastructure built by founders who understood the moment before everyone else did. We believe now is no different.
Catena is building the first AI-native financial institution: a banking platform for agents and the control plane for the humans and businesses who deploy them.
For agents, Catena provides verified identities, accounts, dollar balances, and the ability to send and receive payments across multiple rails, including fiat and stablecoin. Agents do not need banking websites. They need atomic, programmable financial services they can assemble for specific tasks.
For the humans and businesses standing behind those agents, Catena provides a control plane. Set policy. Approve activity. Cap spend. Restrict counterparties. Audit every movement. Halt agent activity when something looks wrong.
Catena’s Private Access program is open, with businesses already using the platform for agent identity, governance, and financial operations including fiat and stablecoin liquidity, risk management, and yield generation.
Back in 2018, when much of the crypto world was chasing fast tokens and fast money, Sean and Matt were quietly architecting a dollar that actually behaves like a dollar on the internet. Audited. Regulated. Boring, in the best possible way. Eight years later, that patient bet underwrites a meaningful share of the world’s digital dollar activity. We think Catena is the same kind of category-defining swing: a ground-up rearchitecture of how money moves in a world of AI-driven transactions, built with the institutional trust, governance, and regulatory rigor that kind of transformation actually requires. Very few startup teams could credibly attempt something this ambitious. Sean and Matt have already proven that they can.
That’s why we could not be more proud that Acrew has co-led Catena’s $30M Series A alongside a16z crypto, with participation from Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, QED, Oak, Fin, and IDG Capital
This brings Catena’s total financing to $48M. Alongside the fresh capital, Catena also announces today that they’ve filed for an OCC National Trust Bank charter.
To Sean, Matt and the whole Catena team: welcome to the crew.
More on Catena
Exclusive: Circle cofounder raises $30 million for Series A ‘AI-native bank’ Catena Labs (Ben Weiss, Fortune)
Catena Labs announces $30M Series A (Catena Labs, LinkedIn)