Natural raises $30M Series A to build payment infrastructure for AI agents

Speaker 2: Like you could sell one of these to every Valkyrie owner in theory because it's so so unique. Yeah. Reminded me of the

Speaker 1: the Rambo Lambo a little Yeah. Totally. Sort of a modern take on that. Yeah. So make the car.

Speaker 2: Make it.

Speaker 1: Aston. Just do it.

Speaker 2: Just do it.

Speaker 1: Just Or shoot. Do it.

Speaker 2: And we will just bring in our next guest. Kahlil from Natural, the CEO and co founder.

Speaker 1: How are doing? Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2: Would you follow that would you buy that if that was a real car? Would that would are you in San Francisco?

Speaker 3: I am in San Francisco. Yeah. So Yeah. Car though.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Was like the wrap cyber truck era for startups.

Speaker 2: Yes. I'd

Speaker 1: like to see a wrap dreadnought

Speaker 2: It would work. It would work. Anyway, enough talking The about

Speaker 3: new BMW car? No. What's The predecessor to the XM? Predecessor?

Speaker 1: That might be more. Or Yeah. Successor. Successor.

Speaker 3: Successor. Successor.

Speaker 2: The XM did not sell well. That was a widely panned that that that's their luxury performance SUV. Right?

Speaker 1: Oh, this is you're talking about the new X five?

Speaker 3: Oh. Yeah. It's like a G Wagon look alike.

Speaker 1: Uh-oh. Oh. Don't think that is actually I don't think that's actually released. I think it may be they'll tease it Graphics. Car Week in a couple weeks.

Speaker 2: But I

Speaker 1: don't think I think every every render so far has been just like

Speaker 2: Oh, just fan made? Okay.

Speaker 1: But I

Speaker 2: Well, we'll keep tracking. Anyway, enough about ours.

Speaker 1: Great to

Speaker 2: see you, dude. How are you doing?

Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us on a big day. Yeah. Introduce yourself. Please.

Speaker 2: Tell us about the company.

Speaker 3: Sure. I'm Kahlil. I'm the CEO of Natural. Natural builds payments infrastructure for agents. We're announcing today that we raise a $30,000,000 series a led by Kirsten, the runner.

Speaker 1: Thank you. There we go. Payment rails for agents. What does that mean today? And then I wanna talk about where this is going in the future.

Speaker 3: Today, that means that agents can store balances. They can pay and request other agents or businesses or consumers. They can do transfers from external or internal accounts. Shortly, they'll be able to collect card information over the phone, make payments. It's a bunch of different payment primitives.

Speaker 1: And so those use cases rank them by traction. So like what what agent payment use cases have the most traction today? Because this feels like one of those things that people have been talking about for a long time. It's a great venture bet because if if, you know, if this category pans out the way that a lot of people have been theorizing, there's gonna be some great big companies built. But I haven't used I haven't used any of these, like, haven't had an agent pay for anything on my behalf quite yet outside of, you know, using traditional checkout flows. Maybe I'm a boomer, lagger

Speaker 2: I sent like a 100 k to Claude, but it turned out it this guy named Claude. I just sent it to him on WhatsApp and

Speaker 1: Damn.

Speaker 2: I don't know if I'm getting that back, so need this.

Speaker 3: You can try your first agentic payment today if you sign up and request our agent. We'll send you back between 5 and $10,000.

Speaker 2: Woah. Okay.

Speaker 1: I love that. Variable report.

Speaker 2: That also sounds like a scam. Send me 5 and I'll send you 10. This is like a classic.

Speaker 1: Wait. Are are people not already using agents to create millions of accounts?

Speaker 2: But but I I do think there's there's a very interesting opportunity. I'm wondering how you can like walk me through this particular problem that I've seen. So there's a really interesting AI YouTuber. His name is Ben Awad and he's been doing this series of like I tried to use a frontier model to like make me money. And he went to Fable and he did GPT Soul and he gave it like a week and he was like, just do whatever and and it it does a bunch of stuff and it's very it's very impressive. He makes like 5¢. He but it's like, you know, a demo. But everything that he's doing is like the reaching for the high shelf. So he's always it's like the genius model that can solve the IMO gold medal goes to him and is like, it's time to buy a domain for $10 And he'll be like, okay, I did that. And then it'll like go off and write the beautiful code and then it'll come back and be like, I need you to go set up an API key here. And so what I'm interested in is, is there a way that soon I will be able to safely upload some sort of credit card payment balance and then give that to an agent and say, look, I want you to go deploy a website on this technology, on this service, use this API, go to eleven Labs, grab their voice agent and go and actually set up the accounts, do the payments and then just here's your budget, don't go over, but go crazy and do whatever.

Speaker 3: You can do most of that today with natural and the parts of it that you can't should be out at the end of q three. I'd say the way we think about the world is agents execute a majority of global payment volume over the next decade

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 3: That that world is monopolistic or duopolistic in nature because payments are a highly network effects driven business Mhmm. And that that world is determined in the next, like, twelve months.

Speaker 2: High stakes. And so Good luck. You're like

Speaker 3: I think I think whoever is like the default developer choice in 2027 is likely to be the default developer choice in 2028 and 2029 and 2035. And so if it doesn't feel like a land grab market, it very much is about to be.

Speaker 1: So a company called Stripe Yes. Is Couple Irishmen. Couple Irishmen. They they're certainly not asleep at the wheel with AI. By nature of being like very developer friendly with their products overall, I think they ended up being like accidentally really well positioned Sure. For AI because agents can really easily understand their products. I'm wondering, have you figured out anything where, like, they are at some type of structural disadvantage because of their existing business model or things that they can and can't do that creates an opportunity for natural? Or is the bet that the market is just gonna grow so quickly there will be a lot of land to grab over these next, call it, twelve to thirty six months?

Speaker 3: I'm a big fan of Stripe. I think that Adjunctive Payments is actually much larger than Stripe. Like, when you think about agents are gonna interact with the world, the way I frame the opportunity is, like, we have the chance to build what looks like a bank, a PSP, and a network all at the same time. Mhmm. So it's like JPMorgan and Stripe and Visa is the TAM, not just Stripe.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So right now, if I go to if I go to Codex and I'm like, go build me an app and deploy it and pay for a bunch of things, it might pull Stripe off the shelf as payment infrastructure, but I don't really have Stripe balance that's sitting there necessarily that it can deploy from. I could give it my credit card, guess, but that's a little bit different than having a wallet.

Speaker 3: You you might have a Stripe balance, but I'd say, you know, the magical experience about with AI is, like, you think of something, you say, can you do this? And the answer is yes. And then you think bigger and you go, can you do this? And the answer is

Speaker 4: yes. Mhmm.

Speaker 3: And I think the same will be true of AgenTic payments, which is like, there shouldn't be a limit in terms of number of financial flows your agent can accomplish. And that is much easier to do when you're building ground up in that new stack with all of the primitives an agent might need under one unified architecture versus trying to rearchitect an existing payment system to do everything that you need to do.

Speaker 2: Well, congratulations. A hundred and ninety three days old when this round was done. A Yes. What an overnight success, truly.

Speaker 1: That's right. And we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna have you back on hopefully this year Yeah. But certainly July 20 next year

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: To talk about your prediction of a of a fast take off in AgenTic payments.

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 1: Look forward to following along and and congrats to the whole team on on the new capital Yeah. All the progress.