- The co-founder of Circle, has raised $18 million for Catena Labs, a new AI bank.
- The AI bank aims to provide financial services for the fast-growing AI agent economy, with AI workers performing many tasks.
- Catena Labs emphasizes the role of stablecoins like USDC in enabling efficient and low-cost transactions for AI agents.
Catena Labs CEO and Circle co-founder, Sean Neville, has started the development of a new financial firm that is powered by artificial intelligence (AI). Catena Labs, the firm behind the AI bank announced via an X thread that it generated $18 million from its latest funding round.
Top investors in this round were Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, Tom Brady (a top NFL player), Breyer Capital and Circle Ventures. Under the leadership of Neville, the company intends to achieve its vision of owning a licensed bank for the AI ecosystem.
According to the announcement, the financial institution will be operated by AI workers as it will be built for AI agents and human collaborators. While there will be human supervision, there will also be risk management and compliance tasks which will be performed by AI.
Catena Labs’ AI Bank as Solution for the AI Agent Economy
In its X thread, Catena Labs said that traditional financial systems are preventing the growth of the AI agent economy because they are unprepared for it. In a previous statement, Neville added that it’s only a matter of time before AI agents start performing most transactions.
His company explained that the current traditional financial system won’t be able to keep up with AI agents as they are gradually becoming powerful economic players. Catena also said the slow, expensive and inflexible system is the reason for its creation of the AI bank.
Neville believes that the AI bank will enable safe and efficient transactions among AI agents and the consumers and businesses they serve. In the announcement, the Catena team said it will use an Agent Commerce Kit (ACK) as an early building block.
This kit is a set of open-source components, patterns and emerging protocols to verify agent identity.
Stablecoins: The Fuel for AI Agent Transactions
In the thread, Catena Labs stated that AI agents become more powerful when combined with stablecoins even though they can also work with financial rails and traditional systems. The firm noted that USDC and similar regulated stablecoins allow AI agents to offer low-cost and almost instant transactions across the globe.
Hence, they can open up new business models and make more money for businesses and individuals.
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