Circle Co-Founder Sean Neville Raises $18M for AI-Native Bank
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More than a decade after cofounding Circle, Sean Neville is stepping back into the spotlight. This time, he’s turning to AI. His new venture, Catena Labs, has just secured $18 million in funding from backers including Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, Breyer Capital, and Circle Ventures. Even Tom Brady joined the round.
Catena’s ambition is to build an AI-native bank. One that, in Neville’s words, envisions a future where “there won’t be any humans or businesses that are executing financial transactions directly… only agents, only AIs.”
This isn’t a sudden pivot. Since leaving Circle in 2020, Neville spent time in quiet study, researching identity, decentralization, and AI. What began as a venture studio evolved into a focused project. By 2023, with the public release of ChatGPT, Catena took shape.
Together with Matt Venables, formerly a senior engineering lead at Circle, and a lean team of seven others, Neville is working to reimagine financial infrastructure: open-source, AI-led, and built for a machine-to-machine economy.
Neville said software from Catena Labs will integrate, but not be defined, by stablecoins. “It solves certain problems,” he said of the cryptocurrency. “It doesn’t solve all the problems.”
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