Catenalabs

Catena Labs develops financial infrastructure and services for AI agents and the humans who work with them. Its product, Catena, is presented as a governance and banking platform through which agents can carry out money-related work — payroll, procurement, accounts payable, sales and treasury — while executing only within predefined, deterministic policies set by a human team. The governance layer covers three areas: verifiable identity, so each agent has a unique identity; deterministic policies that constrain agent financial activity; and audit trails giving full observability into every agent action.

On top of governance, the platform offers composable financial capabilities: accounts with the ability to sweep funds between them, payments via cards, ACH, wires and stablecoins, and yield generation on idle assets, intraday float or corporate treasury. Agents interact through an MCP server, skills, an API and a CLI, while humans retain control over policies and approvals through a personal agent or a web console. Example workflows described by the company include a payroll agent that reads contracts and pays contractors in stablecoins or fiat, a research agent that buys datasets and pays per query, an accounts-payable agent that reviews vendor terms and either releases payment or escalates for review, a treasury agent that trades US Treasuries to manage liquidity, and a procurement agent that verifies supplier agents' identities and negotiates terms.

The company describes its broader ambition as building an AI-native financial institution, including a regulated entity, that lets AI systems identify themselves and transact safely. Related work includes the Agent Commerce Kit (ACK), an open-source collection of patterns and components for AI agent identity and payments, the use of regulated stablecoins such as USDC for low-cost global transactions alongside bridges to traditional banking and payment rails, and risk-management and compliance frameworks tailored to AI agent behavior rather than human users. Catena Labs has also developed DecentAI, a mobile application providing access to open-source AI models with an emphasis on privacy and data control, featuring model mixes, model synthesis, image generation, voice interaction and a "bring your own model" option; it uses a Crosshatch gateway to route queries to models based on complexity and latency, with failover.

Founding story

Catena Labs was founded in 2022 by Sean Neville, co-founder and CEO, and Matt Venables, co-founder and CTO. Neville is a co-founder of Circle and a co-creator of the USDC stablecoin. The company was formed around the view that AI agents are becoming economic participants able to hold assets and execute payments, while existing financial systems — slower, costlier and more rigid — are not built for the speed, scale and risk profile of agent activity.

Business model

Catena Labs provides a platform through which businesses give AI agents access to financial services — accounts, payments and yield — under human-defined policy controls, positioning itself as a regulated financial institution serving businesses and consumers in the agent economy. It also publishes open-source components, notably the Agent Commerce Kit, for agent identity and payments.

Traction

Emerged from stealth in May 2025 with $18 million in seed funding; listed as a private company with 1-10 employees and released the open-source Agent Commerce Kit and the DecentAI mobile application.

Latest developments

In May 2025 Catena Labs came out of stealth and announced an $18 million seed round led by a16z crypto, with participation from Circle Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Breyer Capital, Stanford Engineering VF, Pillar VC and CoinFund, plus angel investors including Balaji Srinivasan, Bradley Horowitz, Kevin Lin and Tom Brady.