Ex-Circle Exec Sean Neville Secures $18M to Launch AI-Driven Bank—Because Traditional Finance Was Too Human
Silicon Valley’s latest moonshot? A bank that thinks before it lends. Sean Neville—cofounder of crypto giants Circle and Catena—just pocketed $18 million in funding for what he’s calling the ’first AI-native bank.’
The pitch: algorithms that underwrite loans in milliseconds, detect fraud before it happens, and (of course) never take a three-martini lunch. Early backers include fintech VCs and crypto whales betting against the 2008-era banking playbook.
One problem? Regulators still file paperwork in triplicate. Neville’s team hints at ’novel charter structures’—Wall Street code for ’we’ll see how fast the FDIC can reboot.’
Bonus jab: Because nothing says ’trustworthy’ like handing your life savings to a machine that hallucinates ChatGPT poetry.
Catena Launches Open Source Agent Commerce Kit
Jim Breyer, founder and CEO of Breyer Capital, opines that Neville and Catena are “uniquely qualified to lead the creation of the first AI-native bank.” This is a massive undertaking as “integrating AI into commerce demands a rebuild of financial infrastructure.”
Neville and Jeremy Allaire founded the crypto trading and payments startup Circle in October 2013. Six years later, at the very end of 2019, Neville stepped down as Circle’s co-CEO. He remains on the board.
Moreover, Neville went on to co-found AI-powered products and services provider Catena in 2022. The company says it aims to enable AI financial services. It will do so by solving the issues burdening AI agents and agentic commerce. These include a lack of capabilities specifically for AI commerce, slow and expensive payment rails, and the inability to handle agent identity and trust.
Therefore, the team says that Catena is building upon protocols, patterns, emerging standards, and open source components to “address new requirements AI agents create for identity and payments.” The first step is releasing a new open-source project. It defines several open-source building blocks, protocols, and patterns for agentic commerce.
4/8 Today we’re also sharing the Agent Commerce Kit (ACK): an open-source set of patterns, components, and emerging protocols for verifiable agent identity and transactions between agents, humans, and businesses. We use ACK as an early building block. Explore ACK:…
— Catena Labs (@catena_labs) May 20, 2025The open-sourceidentifies patterns, components, and emerging protocols necessary for verifiable agent identity. These are also needed for payment flows and receipts between agents, humans, and businesses.
Moreover, ACK is just one of the standards Catena says it’s building. It plans to offer “a broad suite of licensed financial services” specifically related to AI systems working as independent economic actors. This will include solutions for risk, security, and compliance challenges.
“The rise of AI agents is reshaping what’s possible in online commerce, making it clear that we need a financial LAYER built specifically for how these systems operate—one that can handle authentication, payments, and trust at scale,” says Chris Dixon, founder and managing partner at a16z crypto. building financial infrastructure that agentic commerce can depend on, and we’re excited to support their vision.”
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