Catena Labs Is Building the First AI-Native Financial Institution

Catena Labs is an American fintech startup founded in 2022 in Boston by Sean Neville, co-founder of Circle and one of the architects behind the USDC stablecoin. The company's goal is to build the world’s first fully regulated AI-native financial institution designed to serve autonomous software agents, which are becoming active participants in the digital economy. Existing financial systems are not equipped to interact with such agents, creating the need for new infrastructure capable of delivering identity, payments, and trust at scale.

• Mission and Objectives of Catena Labs
• Technological Foundation and Products
• Investments and Partners
• The Role of AI Agents in the Modern Economy
• Catena Labs: Prospects and Challenges
• Conclusion

Mission and Objectives of Catena Labs

Catena Labs aims to build a comprehensive infrastructure for the so-called agent economy, where autonomous AI modules act on behalf of individuals and companies. The project’s founder, Sean Neville, is known for his work on the USDC stablecoin and for co-founding Circle. His experience played a key role in shaping the company’s vision. He believes that the new economic reality requires a radical rethinking of how finance is structured.

Catena Labs is not just building a payment system — it is creating the institutional foundation for a new financial order in which AI agents can:

• Identify themselves on the network as independent entities.
• Access decentralized or centralized financial services.
• Automatically sign, process, and pay for transactions without human involvement.

Payments, trust, and interactions become programmable. In essence, Catena Labs is doing for the agent economy what banks did for the industrial economy — creating an environment where coordination, interaction, and capital movement are possible on a new technological foundation.

The company also aims to ensure legal transparency — developing tools that comply with regulatory requirements, especially in the use of stablecoins and other digital assets. This is particularly important amid increasing regulatory attention to AI and financial technologies.

Technological Foundation and Products

Catena Labs is developing the Agent Commerce Kit (ACK) — a modular system designed to simplify the participation of AI agents in the economy. ACK is not just a library or API, but an architecture that includes both software components and interaction rules among participants.

Main components of ACK:

1. Agent Identification: digital passports for agents with verification and reputation scoring capabilities.
2. Payment Protocols: support for stablecoins and integration with existing payment gateways.
3. Trust Management: models that assess agent behavior and verify contract compliance.

Each agent can create a wallet, link it to a digital identity, and perform actions within the permissions set by its creator. Beyond the technical implementation, the ACK team is also working on ethical and legal frameworks for the AI economy.

Once ACK is implemented, scenarios will be possible where one agent rents a server from another, signs a contract, and pays for it in USDC — all without human involvement. This level of autonomy dramatically accelerates processes and reduces operational costs. Additionally, ACK will be compatible with major blockchains, including Ethereum, and according to Fintech Futures, may also be integrated into DePIN architectures.

Investments and Partners of Catena Labs

Catena Labs’ financial backing serves as a key indicator of trust from leading players in the crypto and venture capital industries. In May 2025, the project completed a seed round raising $18 million, allowing it to emerge from stealth mode and begin expanding its team and launching initial solutions. Participation from major funds and private investors highlights the high potential of AI-native finance as one of the most promising sectors in Web3 and FinTech.

Most investors bring deep expertise in decentralized finance, blockchain, and working with regulated infrastructures. This reflects a strategic vision and a strong understanding of the unique challenge Catena Labs aims to solve. Particular attention is given to regulatory compliance, making the project attractive to institutional players and global startup platforms.

Table: Key Investors in Catena Labs

The funding is being used to develop the core protocol, test interaction models between agents, conduct audits, and expand the legal framework. Additionally, part of the funds are allocated to building partnerships with blockchain ecosystems and startups focused on DePIN and the machine economy. This enables Catena Labs not only to build a product, but to foster an entirely new market category.

The Role of AI Agents in the Modern Economy

Autonomous AI agents are already transforming business processes and daily life by replacing humans in tasks involving data analysis, digital asset management, and system interactions. Their key feature is the ability to make decisions and act without constant human supervision. However, their participation in the economy remains limited due to the lack of legal and technical infrastructure for recognizing them as financial actors.

Catena Labs views agents as new economic participants who require tools for identification, liquidity access, and autonomous transaction execution. For them to become full-fledged actors, a trust-based environment is needed — one that can track behavior, verify counterparties, and enforce contract execution. In practice, this means creating new standards for digital identity, contract logic, and payment interfaces designed not for humans but for machine logic.

Supporting such agents is not only a technological challenge but a paradigm shift in economic thinking. Instead of the traditional “human-to-system” model, we now see an “agent-to-protocol” approach, where humans set the parameters and algorithms execute. Catena Labs is enabling this future by turning autonomous agents into equal participants in the digital economy.

Catena Labs: Prospects and Challenges

Catena Labs faces numerous strategic and tactical challenges that require a comprehensive approach. Scaling the project means not just increasing the number of users, but building an ecosystem where millions of agents with varying functions and permissions interact. This involves developing complex scenarios, addressing legal risks, and engaging with global financial institutions. Ethical and accountability issues are also crucial — who is responsible if an agent’s actions cause losses?

To realize its ambitions, Catena Labs must address several key goals:

• Establish regulatory frameworks in jurisdictions that support the agent economy;
• Integrate with global payment systems and DeFi infrastructure;
• Build trust in software agents through transparent algorithms and reputation systems;
• Scale the protocol architecture to a global level;
• Educate developers and businesses on using ACK and next-gen financial environments.

Catena Labs has already shown its ability to attract market and investor attention. The next stage is to prove the viability of its model in practice. If successful, the project could set the standard for a new financial era, where intelligence and code drive capital flows. This could redefine the very nature of economic interaction and lead to the emergence of a new class of autonomous networks.

Conclusion

Catena Labs is laying the foundation for a future financial system not centered solely around humans, but around communities of autonomous digital agents capable of acting independently and intelligently. Building the infrastructure for an economy where software modules participate in contracts, make payments, and interact with each other shifts the financial paradigm itself. The project goes beyond technical implementation, addressing broader issues of trust, jurisdiction, and digital identity. Backed by major investors and a deep understanding of Web3 architecture, Catena Labs is well positioned not just to enter the market — but to redefine its core principles.