We are pleased to announce our participation in Catena Labs' $30 million Series A, bringing their total financing to $48 million. Alongside this round, Catena is opening Private Access to select businesses and has announced that their application for a National Trust Bank charter has been accepted for filing by the OCC, a milestone that represents a structural unlock for the business.
At Oak HC/FT, our fintech investing has long centered on a core belief: the most durable companies are not built around features, but around the infrastructure layers that an entire ecosystem is forced to adopt. Catena is building one of those layers.
In Claude, Cowork, ChatGPT, Codex, and OpenClaw and across dozens of enterprise automation platforms, agents and autonomous software are attempting to hold funds, initiate payments, settle invoices, and earn yield on idle assets on behalf of the people and businesses that deploy them. Mostly, the agents are not able to perform.
This is because the financial system was architected for humans, requiring things like physical identity documents, wet-ink signatures, and manual compliance reviews. That architecture made sense for the era it was designed for, but it does not make sense for the emerging era in which agents are an active economic participant. The result is a structural mismatch where agents are capable of executing sophisticated commercial workflows, but they are blocked at every turn by infrastructure that does not recognize them as legitimate actors. This is not a product gap. It is a category-level infrastructure problem, and it is the problem Catena was built to solve.
Catena's architecture reflects a clear-eyed understanding of what it actually takes to solve this problem – not just technically, but institutionally.
The platform is two products in one, by design. For agents themselves, Catena functions as a banking platform, including verified identities, accounts that can hold U.S. dollars, programmable financial services, and stablecoin liquidity across ten blockchains. What Catena understands is that agents do not need banking websites and should not be constrained by human centric financial workflows. They need atomic, composable primitives they can assemble for specific tasks. For the humans and businesses deploying those agents, Catena functions as a governance control plane where operators set policy, cap spending, restrict counterparties, approve activity, audit every movement, and halt agent behavior when necessary. The principle underlying both products is the same. Catena is offering autonomy with accountability.
That framing matters because it is the right answer to the question regulators and enterprise buyers will inevitably ask: how do we know what the agent did, and who is responsible? Catena answers that question structurally.
What separates Catena from other players in this still-nascent space is their full-stack infrastructure approach, starting with a strong regulatory foundation. The company has filed for a National Trust Bank charter with the OCC. Most companies attempting to serve the agentic commerce market are software wrappers sitting on top of licensed third parties – arrangements that are fragile, constrained, and ultimately disqualifying for the enterprise customers who need a regulated counterparty they can point to. By becoming a regulated financial institution purpose-built for agents and their operators, Catena earns a structural position that software alone cannot replicate. It becomes the licensed orchestration platform capable of bridging fiat and stablecoin rails, absorbing compliance risk, and serving as the trusted counterparty the regulated financial system requires.
We believe that agentic payments and, more broadly, agent-led financial services, is a generational opportunity arriving faster than most people appreciate. Early signals from Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and Coinbase already indicate that major infrastructure players are building toward agent-native transaction primitives. As LLMs become increasingly capable of initiating commercial actions rather than simply recommending them, the volume of machine-to-machine transactions will scale in ways that are genuinely difficult to model today. The infrastructure question of who governs that activity, who holds the balances, and who bears the regulatory responsibility is still largely unanswered. That is a category-defining opportunity.
Our conviction in Catena's ability to capture it begins with the founding team. CEO Sean Neville co-founded Circle and was the primary architect of USDC, a credential that reflects not just technical depth, but the rare ability to drive adoption of open financial standards at global scale. He is joined by Matt Venables, formerly of Circle, Vested and M2 Labs; and Sharda Caro Del Castillo, who served as Chief Legal Officer at Affirm through its IPO, Head of Payments at Airbnb, and Payments Counsel at Square. This is a team that has built regulated, programmable financial infrastructure before, at scale. The team possesses the unique combination of technical credibility, regulatory fluency, and commercial experience that it takes to build a generational financial institution.
We are proud to partner with Sean and the entire Catena team as they build the trusted platform for the agent economy.