Tip-offs
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Each week, we surface promising startups & founders through data signals.
This week, we're spotlighting agentic finance and the rails for AI money →
The next Stripe gets built for machines, not people
Agent-mediated commerce hits $1T by 2030. But the payment stack isn't ready.
Every fintech giant — Stripe, Plaid, Visa, Square — was built on one premise: a person is always on the other end of the transaction. That premise is about to be wrong for a trillion-dollar slice of commerce. Agent-mediated retail alone is projected at ~$1T by 2030 in the US.
When software transacts for you, every primitive gets rewritten: identity, authorization, fraud, settlement, dispute. Incumbents can't retrofit, as their risk models and cardholder products are engineered around human behavior. But for startups? This brings a once-in-a-decade stack rebuild opportunity.
The last one minted Stripe. Who will pioneer the next one?
Agentic Finance Startups
Recently funded startups rebuilding payments, identity, and risk for AI agents.
t54 Labs | Seed, Feb 2026
Trust layer for agentic finance. Covers agent identity verification ("know your agent"), real-time risk monitoring, credit lines for agents, and settlement in a single platform. Raised a $5M Seed in Feb 2026.
San Francisco, US
Sapiom | Seed, Feb 2026
Spend infrastructure for AI agents. A one-line API integration lets autonomous agents execute financial transactions with enterprise-grade controls. Raised a $15.75M Seed in Feb 2026.
San Francisco, US
Ember AI | Angel, Dec 2025
Web3 infrastructure for wallet-native agents. Verifiable agents autonomously execute DeFi strategies, manage portfolios, and run optimized on-chain actions. Raised an Angel round in Dec 2025.
Locus | Pre-Seed, Dec 2025
Payment infrastructure for AI agents. Ships a Stripe-style checkout SDK for merchants to accept payments from agents. Raised a $500K Pre-Seed from Y Combinator in Dec 2025 (YC F25 batch).
San Francisco, US
Kite | Series A, Oct 2025
AI Payment Blockchain providing foundational infra for the agentic economy, including identity, payments, governance, and verification rails for autonomous agents. Raised a Series A in Oct 2025.
San Francisco, US
Agentic Finance Founders
Recently funded founders building financial infrastructure for AI agents.
Susan O'Neill
2x Founder. Previously founded Sulu, a payments infrastructure provider for AI apps. Now co-founder & CEO of Paygentic, billing & payments infrastructure for AI-native businesses. Raised $2M Pre-Seed in Oct 2025.
Kilkenny, Ireland
Vyas Krishnan
Ex-Product Lead at EigenLayer. Now co-founder & CEO of Nava AI, an escrow & verification layer for autonomous agents. Raised $8.3M Seed in Apr 2026.
Bellevue, US
Kahlil Lalji
2x Founder. Previously co-founded Ivella (acquired by EarnIn, 2024). Now co-founder & CEO of Natural, building payments infrastructure for the agent economy. Raised $9.8M Seed in Oct 2025.
San Francisco, US
Ghali Bennani Laafiret
Ex-revenue operations at Alan and LumApps. Now co-founder & CEO of Ralio, a payments layer purpose-built for AI agents. Raised $2.5M Pre-Seed in Apr 2026.
London, UK
Viggo Stenseth
Ex-Engineer Manager at Spotify. Now co-founder & CEO of SolvaPay, a payment layer for autonomous AI agent transactions. Raised ~$2.8M Pre-Seed in Apr 2026.
Stockholm, Sweden
Carried Interest
Tweets & articles of the week
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