Natural emerged from stealth with $9.8 million in seed funding to build the financial infrastructure enabling AI agents to autonomously execute transactions—addressing a critical bottleneck as legacy payment systems designed for human-to-human interaction fail to support agent-driven commerce at enterprise scale.

The fintech startup’s emergence signals a fundamental infrastructure shift as enterprises move beyond pilot AI implementations toward production agent workflows that require autonomous financial capabilities. Traditional payment rails lack the complex approval chains and programmatic interfaces necessary for agents operating with business authorization and transaction accountability.

Basis Theory raised $33 million in Series B funding led by Costanoa Ventures to build payment infrastructure for agentic commerce—where AI agents conduct transactions autonomously on behalf of users and businesses.

The funding addresses a critical infrastructure bottleneck as AI agents evolve from assistants to autonomous buyers. Traditional payment systems lock merchants into rigid platforms and fragment sensitive transaction data across multiple processors, creating compliance headaches and limiting how businesses can leverage payment intelligence for automation and growth.

Kite AI closed an $18 million Series A led by PayPal Ventures and General Catalyst, bringing total funding to $33 million for infrastructure addressing a fundamental bottleneck: how autonomous AI agents authenticate, transact, and coordinate with each other at machine speed.

The funding signals growing recognition that current human-centric payment and identity systems create friction points for agent-to-agent commerce. As enterprises deploy more autonomous agents for tasks ranging from procurement to customer service, the infrastructure gap between agent capabilities and transactional requirements has become a deployment blocker.