Catena Labs announced its plan to establish the first fully regulated AI-native financial institution (FI) designed to serve the unique needs of the emerging AI economy. The company released a new open-source project defining protocols and patterns for agentic commerce. The company also confirmed an $18 million financing round led by a16z crypto, with participation from Breyer Capital, Circle Ventures, Coinbase Ventures and others. The company aims to address the shortcomings in legacy financial systems that make them poorly suited to the needs of AI agents and agentic commerce. “AI agents will soon conduct most economic transactions, but today’s financial systems are unprepared and resistant to interactions with automated intelligence,” said Sean Neville, CEO and co-founder of Catena Labs. “That’s why we’re building an AI-native financial institution that will give AI agents, and the businesses and consumers they serve, the ability to transact safely and efficiently.” The company is building upon protocols, patterns, emerging standards, and open source components to address new requirements AI agents create for identity and payments. Today, the company released the open source Agent Commerce Kit (ACK), which defines several of these open source building blocks. The company is building on ACK and other emerging standards to offer a broad suite of licensed financial services addressing new risk, security, and compliance challenges that arise from AI systems working as independent economic actors.