- Natural has raised a $30 million Series A led by Forerunner’s Kirsten Green just 193 days after launch, bringing total funding to more than $40 million in under a year.
- CEO Kahlil Lalji is positioning Natural as a direct Stripe rival — but with AI agents, not humans, as the customer — betting autonomous systems will become the world’s most important financial actors.
- The agentic AI payments market is projected to grow from $7 billion to $93 billion by 2032 as AI agents begin executing purchases, invoices, and transfers without human approval.
At 13, Kahlil Lalji edited esports videos professionally. At 18, he ran brand strategy for the internet’s biggest creators. At 21, he signed a musician to Columbia Records. He later co-founded YC-backed fintech startup Ivella before joining EarnIn in 2024. None of that is the most interesting thing about him right now. The most interesting thing is that he just raised a $30 million Series A for a fintech company that is 193 days old — in one of the hardest categories in venture capital to raise money in.
Natural, the San Francisco-based payments infrastructure startup Lalji co-founded alongside Eric Wang and Walt Leung 342 days ago, has closed a $30 million Series A led by Kirsten Green at Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Human Capital, Abstract, Wischoff Ventures, and angel investors including Akshay Kothari of Notion, Pete Koomen of Y Combinator, Art Levy of Brex, and Logan and Jake Paul’s Antifund. Total funding now exceeds $40 million. The company has 17 employees and is hiring across every function.
Building Stripe for AI agents
Natural is not building another payments company for people. Stripe, now valued at over $150 billion, built internet payments for businesses and developers run by humans. Natural is designing the equivalent financial rails specifically for AI agents — systems that will hold wallets, receive payments, pay invoices, make purchases, issue cards, and transfer funds across banks and currencies without a person approving each step.
Rather than sitting on third-party infrastructure, Natural says it owns the stack directly — ledgering, multi-bank settlement, multi-currency movement, fraud detection, compliance, and agent identity verification. That is the architectural claim that separates it from fintech companies that aggregate existing rails rather than operating them, and the one that puts it on a collision course with Stripe as both companies race to own agentic payment infrastructure.
Six products are now in general availability: FDIC-insured agent wallets, one-way vaults that accept money but never release it autonomously, peer-to-peer payment and request tools, internal and external transfer infrastructure, and a marketplace-building layer. Voice-based PCI payments, agent-issued debit and charge cards, and per-API-call billing are shipping over the coming months. Credit lines for agents and direct payment rail access follow in Q4. Natural is planning 13 products in total within its first year.
“Agents are going to become one of the most, if not the most, important financial actors in the global economy,” Lalji said. “The question is not whether agents will move money. The question is who builds the infrastructure that makes agentic payments safe, reliable, compliant, and useful at scale. That is what we are building at Natural.”
The competitive field
Natural is not alone. London-based Ralio raised $2.5 million in April 2026 to build agentic payment guardrails and identity verification. Paygentic raised $2 million to build AI-native billing infrastructure. Both are pre-seed operations. The deeper competitive pressure comes from Stripe itself, which is actively building agentic payment capabilities into its own platform. Natural’s bet is that Stripe will not move fast enough, or build natively enough, to own the agent infrastructure layer before it sets.
The investor and the market
Forerunner has previously backed Chime, Warby Parker, Faire, Dollar Shave Club, and Glossier — a track record built on picking consumer category-defining companies early. This is a different kind of bet: infrastructure, not consumer. Kirsten Green describing Natural as having “consumer DNA” in an AI infrastructure company signals that Forerunner believes the agentic payments category will be won by companies that understand how real financial behaviour works, not just how APIs connect.
The market numbers support the urgency. The agentic AI payments market is projected to grow from $7 billion today to $93 billion by 2032, according to Nevermined. MarketsandMarkets puts the broader AI agents market at $7.84 billion in 2025, growing to $52.62 billion by 2030 at a 46.3% CAGR. Global payments revenue, per McKinsey, hit $2.5 trillion in 2025.
The harder question is timing. Agentic commerce transaction volumes today are still negligible — one analysis put actual protocol transaction volumes at $28,000 per day globally as of early 2026. Natural is raising at infrastructure scale before the demand exists at infrastructure scale. If Lalji is right, this is Stripe’s early years playing out again. If he is wrong, $40 million buys a lot of runway for a market that may arrive later than the fundraising pace implies.
