AI agents are starting to execute more sophisticated tasks, such as identifying vendors that can deliver freight, comparing prices, and messaging the vendor to organizing a delivery. But when it comes to making a payment for the shipment, they still need to involve a human.

Today’s financial sector relies on financial rails, the underlying infrastructure that moves money and information between a money and financial information between banks, businesses, and consumers. But these financial rails were built for human-initiated transactions, not autonomous AI agents. For example, traditional payment systems like credit cards and ACH rely on human authorization for transactions, which slows down agents engineered to work autonomously.

One new startup, Natural, is tackling the problem by redesigning the whole system from the ground up. And it now has $30 million in fresh capital to pursue an ambitious plan that will put it in direct competition with giants like Stripe.

About a year ago, Natural co-founder and CEO Kahlil Lalji realized that AI agents were evolving faster than existing financial architecture, which can’t support tasks like autonomously paying a vendor, collecting payments, or transacting with each other.

Lalji has a background in banking and finance, but as he prepared to launch another startup he had hoped to avoid the sector. His previous startup Ivella, a YC-backed banking and financial product for couples was sold in 2023 to Earnin, where he worked as an engineer for two years. He told TechCrunch he had been burned by the finance sector after the Zero Interest Rate Policy era ended.

And yet, Lalji couldn’t ignore the opportunity.

“I kept on coming back to it,” he said. “It just feels obvious that agentic payments are going to be structurally the most important problem [in the] space.”

Lalji teamed up with Eric Wang, his co-founder at Ivella, and Walt Leung, a former engineering manager at Nextdoor, and founded Natural in 2025. The startup positions itself as an agent orchestration layer that enables AI agents to move and store funds. By integrating Natural’s infrastructure, companies can allow their agents to make autonomous payments, collect funds, and transact with both humans and other agents.

Natural got the attention of Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner at VC firm Forerunner. Green, whose firm focuses on consumer experiences and the future of commerce, led its $30 million Series A round in the company, bringing the company’s total funding to $40 million.

Green was attracted by Natural’s broader ambitions. The startup isn’t just focused on helping agents pay for and check out goods on behalf of consumers, it’s also trying to reinvent payment infrastructure, including how disputed transactions are handled.  

Although Natural has operated in a beta trial until now, Lalji told TechCrunch that the startup has made enough critical architectural decisions to give it a “good shot” at competing with incumbents like Stripe, which is also racing to redesign payment rails for AI agents.

Lalji hopes that Natural’s fast development speed will allow it to outpace established giants and build the payment infrastructure that will serve as the financial backbone of AI agents. The startup’s mission has attracted senior staff who previously worked at fintech giants Stripe, Ramp, and Square.

Although Natural views Stripe as its main competitor, several other startups, including DCVC-backed Skyfire Systems, are trying to reinvent the payments backbone for AI agents using USD-backed stablecoins. While Natural plans to incorporate stablecoins into its architecture, it is also building support for traditional bank payments.

While there is a fierce race to dominate the field, Lalji is betting the entire market could grow significantly if transactions happen at computer speed rather than human speed. “The number of payments that may occur in the world may be two or three or four orders of magnitude greater than the number of payments that exist today,” he said.

Roughly half the world’s population is female, but the STEM fields don’t reflect that. The 2024 U.N. Global Education Monitoring Report on gender found that about 35 percent of STEM college graduates were women. The proportion hasn’t increased much in more than a decade.

When it comes to STEM careers, the percentage is even lower. Women made up about 28 percent of the global STEM workforce in 2024, according to the World Economic Forum.

There are myriad factors for the discrepancy, including a lack of family support, some teachers encouraging only boys to pursue STEM subjects, and a shortage of female role models.

But one force is at play long before college majors are ever considered: limited access to STEM-focused educational resources for preuniversity students. Especially for students in rural communities, the limited access curtails curiosity in STEM subjects before interest can take root. Although the lack of opportunity impacts boys and girls alike, when combined with other factors it can have an outsized effect on girls in some rural regions.

IEEE Fellow Rajiv Joshi is one of the creators of the Women in Science, Engineering project. He is a principal scientist and master inventor at the IBM Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.Rajiv Joshi

One such place is rural India. The challenges of pursuing a STEM education—or any education at all—increase sharply as rural Indian girls move into their teen years. Social barriers including early marriage, traditional gender roles, and familial expectations for financial support contribute to girls’ dropping out of school, according to the Mahadev Maitri Foundation, a nongovernment organization focused on childhood education in underdeveloped areas. Dropout rates for girls spike between the ages of 11 to 14, according to the foundation.

The trend is something IEEE Fellow Rajiv Joshi and IEEE Senior Member Rajesh Zele want to change. A shared passion to keep rural Indian girls from dropping out of school and on paths to STEM careers led them to launch the Women in Science, Engineering (WiSE) project.

“Talent is universal, but opportunity is not,” Joshi says. “WiSE is one way to expand opportunities.”

Bringing the WiSE vision to life

Joshi, vice president of industry for the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS), is a principal scientist and master inventor at the IBM Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Zele is a professor of electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B), in suburban Mumbai.

They presented their proposal for the three-year initiative to the society’s board of governors in 2022 and received a grant of US $80,000.

The framework

WiSE was a five-day, hands-on learning program held on the IIT-B campus. Starting in 2023, it ran for three years and was held during the last week of March. A new cohort of 160 to 200 girls from rural and tribal areas in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka attended each year.

The event was divided into two parts: hands-on learning through Break-Make-Program (BMP) experiences and presentations by influential female Indian role models.

Zele, project manager Arti Auti, several IIT-B faculty members, and about 70 student volunteers from the institute oversaw the program.

Selecting the first cohort

With funding secured, Zele and his team on the ground in India got busy selecting attendees for the inaugural 2023 class. They reached out to administrators at 68 schools in Maharashtra and Karnataka. Although the two states are among the most urbanized in the country, each has vast rural areas where educating teen girls competes with early marriage and familial support pressure.

Teachers identified girls with high scores in mathematics and science, and community leaders recommended students who could benefit from the program.

Then outreach to their parents began. The adults were required to commit their own time, not just grant permission for their daughters to attend. They participated in quarterly online meetings that included the girls’ teachers, IIT-B student mentors, and other program volunteers after the week concluded. The check-ins held parents accountable for supporting their daughters’ continuing school attendance. The commitment to join the meetings was to last for at least four years after their daughter’s program participation ended.

Hands-on learning is key

Participants stayed in one of the institute’s dormitories for the week and attended sessions held Monday through Friday.

They worked together in small teams to build things rooted in STEM concepts. The teams were supervised by Arti, IIT-B faculty, and student volunteers.

“The idea behind BMP,” Joshi says, “was to give the girls an opportunity to take a gadget apart, then rebuild it, perfect it, or come up with a totally new idea.”

The sessions included working with bioluminescence and bacteria (introducing participants to biology and microbiology), learning about autonomous underwater vehicles, and building a remote-controlled robot. The robot construction was the capstone event, allowing the girls to combine the mechanical and electronics engineering skills they’d practiced throughout the week.

The build kits were created by students in Zele’s Advanced Integrated Circuits and Systems Lab. The girls and teachers were allowed to take the kits home to keep the learning going and spread STEM awareness.

“Many girls used those kits at different events to demonstrate their STEM skills to others,” Joshi says. One was Sushi Pawar, who built a drone during WiSE, then went on to demonstrate it to a national audience.

“I presented the drone project in 2024 to Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the Pariksha Pe Charcha,” Pawar says. That initiative is an annual event open for students in classes 6 to 12, their teachers, and parents. The focus is on helping students manage stress during exam time through fun and celebratory activities. The event is supported by the Indian Ministry of Education and hosted by the prime minister.

Each year, millions of students complete an online multiple-choice test to qualify to attend in person and meet the prime minister. In 2024 nearly 4,000 participants attended.

Inspiration as the foundation

WiSE was about more than hands-on learning. It also included daily presentations from “Winspirers”: Indian women who achieved success in their lives or had STEM careers. They included scientists, doctors, military officers, professors, and other women who overcame obstacles.

The first such speaker was Savita Dakle, a farmer from Maharashtra who dropped out of school after 10th grade, got married, and had two children.

Despite limited farming knowledge, she learned quickly and built a coalition of 400 female farmers from her village. She taught them how to use mobile phones and social media to share information and resources.

Today, that coalition has more than 1 million members in two online communities. They share tips on market pricing, growing crops, and more.

Zele says he views Dakle as the ideal Winspirer: someone who built a thriving business with few resources and no academic or professional credentials.

Dakle mirrors the challenges faced by many program participants, he says, noting that many girls face pressure to leave school early to marry or financially support their family. She is living proof, he says, that no girl’s circumstances define her possibilities.

The practical impact of WiSE

No empirical data yet exists to measure the project’s success, but feedback from participants shows the program has made a difference. Many from the 2023 cohort remained in school and are now pursuing higher education.

Participant Tejswini Manoj Patil credits the initiative with boosting her confidence in science and math.

“Before WiSE,” she says, “I was interested in STEM but felt intimidated by the complexity of the subjects. After participating, my interest shifted from passive curiosity to active confidence. The hands-on projects showed me that I am capable of solving real-world problems.”

Meeting female role models was important, attendee Ritu Ravindra Patil says, adding: “WiSE completely changed my perspective, and meeting the Winspirers inspired me to aim for higher education.”

The project opened career perspectives for some.

“Before WiSE, I wanted to be a doctor,” Pallavi Bharti says. “I believed engineering was very stressful and boring. When I joined the program and explored IIT-B, I was amazed. Everyone was so friendly and supportive, and the passion in students for their work motivated me. All those experiences gave me confidence to take math classes and become an engineer.”

What’s next?

The initiative ended last year, but the framework it built lives on. Groups with similar goals have adopted parts of the concept, Joshi says.

The IEEE CASS chapters in Bangalore and Kerala are likely to be among the first to advance the initiative’s ideas, he says.

Alex James, an IEEE senior member and founding chair of the IEEE CASS Kerala chapter, has adapted the framework for use in his region, Joshi says. James is a professor of AI hardware and a dean at Digital University Kerala in Thiruvananthapuram.

Joshi guided James as WiSE concepts were implemented.

IEEE Senior Members Jayesh Tanwani and Suman Dwivedi from the IEEE CASS Bangalore chapter are likely to bring program concepts into their work, Joshi says.

Tanwani, chair of the Bangalore chapter, is a system-on-a-chip design engineering manager at Intel in Bengaluru. Dwivedi is a senior manager at Synopsys in Bengaluru. They are bringing STEM outreach to remote schools in Karnataka.

Joshi and Zele say they hope to see the concept expand beyond India.

“We want to spread this across other continents and see how we can integrate WiSE into new or existing initiatives in those places,” Joshi says. He says he has received requests from countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe for information on WiSE.

Both say awareness and outreach are key things that IEEE CASS chapters around the world are well positioned to support.

“We want to make a difference in young women’s lives,” Zele says. “It’s all about giving attendees the skills to stand on their own feet and have the information to make good decisions.”

Paramount Skydance’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery has hit a roadblock after a judge temporarily paused the deal in response to a lawsuit filed by a coalition of 12 state attorneys general who argue that the merger would harm competition.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued a 14-day pause on Monday after hearing arguments from both sides last week. The coalition, which is being led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, could seek another pause after the 14 days, further delaying the merger.

The lawsuit from the states alleges that the deal would harm movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and audiences. They argue that if the two companies are allowed to merge, it would lessen competition in three areas: wide release theatrical film distribution, “top-grossing” theatrical distribution, and basic cable licensing.

“This is a critical first win in our case to ensure this megamerger never sees the light of day,” said Attorney General Bonta in a statement. “History tells the tale of what happens when a few people have great power over markets that are central to Americans’ lives: fewer opportunities for more people, worse products and services for all people. With our lawsuit, we’re fighting for a free and fair market and a thriving film and television industry that serves creatives and audiences alike. We have a full tank of gas, the law on our side, and look forward to continuing to make our case.”

The deal would combine two notable film studios as well as streaming platforms Paramount+ and HBO Max. It would also create one of the largest portfolios of television networks, bringing together Paramount’s CBS and MTV with WBD’s CNN and HBO.

Paramount CEO David Ellison had said in May that the transaction was on track to close by September. The legal roadblock has the potential to derail Paramount’s efforts to transform into a major competitor to companies like Netflix.

The proposed acquisition has received scrutiny from filmmakers, actors, and industry professionals who argued that the deal would reduce competition and further consolidate the U.S. media industry. 

Paramount and WBD did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s requests for comment.