- Catena Labs secured $18 million in seed funding from top investors including a16z, Coinbase Ventures, Circle, and Tom Brady.
- The startup is developing financial infrastructure using Artificial Intelligence and stablecoins for autonomous transactions.
- Sean Neville, co-creator of the USDC stablecoin, co-founded Catena Labs.
- This marks Brady’s return to the crypto sector after losses tied to the collapse of FTX and related lawsuits.
- Catena has launched an open-source toolkit enabling AI agents to perform financial activities independently.
Catena Labs, a Boston-based technology startup, announced it has raised $18 million in seed financing. The funding round includes investments from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Coinbase Ventures, Circle, and former NFL quarterback Tom Brady. The company is focused on creating new digital payment systems that use artificial intelligence and regulated stablecoins.
The project is led by Sean Neville, previously a co-founder of Circle and a creator of the USDC stablecoin. According to Neville, the company’s goal is to build "an AI-native financial institution" designed to let AI agents, businesses, and customers manage secure transactions efficiently. Other participants in the seed round include Stanford Engineering Venture Fund, Breyer Capital, and several notable angel investors such as Balaji Srinivasan and Kevin Lin.
Catena Labs has also introduced the Agent Commerce Kit, which is an open-source tool intended to let AI systems confirm their identity and make autonomous payments. The company argues that today’s financial and retail systems are not prepared for fully AI-driven transactions.
The company will use regulated stablecoins—including USDC—to enable AI-powered payments alongside traditional banking networks. Stablecoins are digital tokens whose values are tied to stable assets like the U.S. dollar, and are designed to reduce price volatility.
Tom Brady’s investment in Catena comes after his high-profile experience with the failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, where he was a paid ambassador and suffered significant losses following FTX’s collapse in 2022. Brady, who was recently cleared in an FTX lawsuit, also previously co-founded NFT platform Autograph, which raised $200 million before shifting its focus to digital collectibles.
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