Natural, a fintech company building the infrastructure powering agentic payments, announced its emergence from stealth, driven by a $9.8 million seed round. Co-led by Abstract and Human Capital, the round was also supported by Forerunner Ventures, Terrain, Restive Ventures, Genius Ventures, and a coalition of tech founders and operators–including Zach Abrams (CEO, Bridge), Immad Akhund (CEO, Mercury), Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh (CEO & CTO, Ramp), Guillermo Rauch (CEO, Vercel), Itai Damti (CEO, Unit), and Matt Michaelis (CEO, Emprise Bank).
Legacy payment systems are built around human-to-human interaction, though agents will soon be responsible for a majority of global transaction volume. Natural is building the payments infrastructure for this agent economy — making it easy for agents to send, receive, and manage payments with businesses, consumers, and other agents. The company is starting with embedded B2B use cases and aims to power all types of financial interactions in the future.
“Today’s agents lack the fundamental infrastructure necessary to financially engage with the broader world,” said Kahlil Lalji, Natural CEO. “We need infrastructure allowing them to act securely and effectively. We’re here to fix that.”
Natural is built to support the complex workflows and approval chains required for autonomous payments, empowering companies to build agents that can make decisions and complete transactions on their behalf. Examples include:
- Property management: Agents sourcing, hiring, and paying contractors for maintenance.
- Logistics: A freight negotiation agent settling payments with truckers.
- Healthcare: A back-office agent sourcing and paying vendors and suppliers at a hospital.
- Procurement: Inventory management agents monitoring product in real-time, negotiating with suppliers, and automatically handling payments.
- Construction: Agents sourcing labor and materials, negotiating terms, and enabling instant payments between and across large suppliers and independent tradespeople.
“AI is moving from demos to production, and a major bottleneck is money that moves at the speed of compute,” said Ramtin Naimi, founder of Abstract. “Natural solves the missing link for AI workflows to be truly end-to-end by rebuilding the stack for developers and agents across identity, authorization, and low-latency settlement.”
By autonomously handling approval chains and executing payments, Natural removes key operational hurdles for businesses, freeing teams to spend less time on complex transactions and more on strategic work.
“After knowing Walt and Kahlil for more than five years, we had no doubt about their ambition and how high they’d set the bar for the team they want to build,” said Baris Akis, co-founder and CEO of Human Capital. “We are excited to lead Natural’s seed round and work closely with them to scale an exceptional team building the payment stack for AI agents.”
