While agentic AI is poised to upend many aspects of the traditional economy, today’s tools stop at the execution point: they can advise, propose, and even simulate transactions, but they cannot execute them. At Restive, we have been eyeing this friction point for some time, and we were beyond excited when the Natural team presented their idea for a truly autonomous, agentic payment system based on preexisting, efficient transaction rails.
Natural’s vision is to build an agentic payments protocol: a simple, natural-language layer that lets AI agents pay, collect, and reconcile funds safely across existing rails. It closes the loop between intelligent automation and real-world commerce, enabling workflows that were previously impossible: autonomous invoice payments, contractor disbursements, and agent-to-agent microtransactions.
We’ve known Kahlil and Eric for a long time as former Restive founders, and it was clear from the start that Kahlil, Eric and their cofounder Walt bring a rare combination of technical depth and operational excellence. They’ve been obsessed with the intersection of financial plumbing and user experience for years, and they have both the technical chops and years of experience working with financial institutions required to solve this challenge. Their persistence shows in how quickly they’ve turned an early idea into a functioning product and real customers.
The opportunity ahead is massive. Global payments already top $2 trillion in annual revenue, and as AI agents gain credentialed autonomy, transactions become programmable events. That convergence–between AI orchestration and financial execution–represents a multi-billion-dollar category waiting to be built.
Today, Natural AI is announcing their $9.8M Seed round. We were the team’s first call and we’re super excited to back Natural AI as this talented team works to bridge the gap between payments, agentic tools and workflows
As AI financial services take shape to support the explosion of new companies and business models, Natural is at the forefront of this wave of innovation.
Restive Ventures is proud to support Kahlil, Eric, Walt and the Natural AI team as they bring the future of payments to life, one agentic transaction at a time. Congratulations to the entire Natural team, and we can’t wait to see what’s next!
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