By Hamza Faisal
The world's biggest stablecoin issuer just placed a bet on robots with wallets. Mural, a New York fintech startup founded by former Palantir engineers, has raised a $15 million Series A led by Tether, betting that AI agents are about to start moving money — and that someone has to keep the books.
The round, announced Tuesday, included participation from North Island Ventures and existing investors, bringing Mural's total funding to $28 million after a $5 million seed round in 2022. Mural was founded that year by chief executive Sinclair Toffa and Chris Fernandes, both alumni of Palantir's engineering ranks.
Mural describes itself as a "compliant system of record" — infrastructure that lets fintechs and platforms hold accounts, move payments, verify identities, and stay compliant across both traditional bank rails and blockchains, all through a single account that can hold dollars, local currencies, and stablecoins. Customers including payroll platform Deel and browser maker Opera already build payroll and remittance products on top of it. Since launching its API in 2025, Mural says it has processed $2.1 billion in payment volume across 128 countries — with 2026 volume so far running nearly six times its 2025 total.
Banking the bot economy
The pitch is timed to the rise of "agentic finance" — AI systems that initiate and execute transactions on behalf of people and businesses. Mural says its accounts are already ready for that future: a policy engine enforces transaction limits, restricts approved counterparties, and requires extra approvals on larger payments, answering the awkward question of who authorized a payment — and who is accountable — when software moves the money.
"As agents start moving money, that connection to the banks, payment networks and compliance systems the world still runs on becomes essential," Tether chief executive Paolo Ardoino said in the announcement. Ardoino framed the investment as part of Tether's push beyond stablecoin issuance into the infrastructure programmable payments will need.
Mural even runs like its founders' old employer: it embeds "forward-deployed" engineers with customers to navigate local markets, handle banking partners, and stitch together compliance vendors as clients scale.
An arms race for agent-ready money
The bet lands as stablecoin payments surge — real-world volumes roughly doubled in 2025 to around $390 billion, by McKinsey and Artemis estimates — and AI agents are already transacting. Chainalysis reported that agents made more than 138 million payments through the x402 protocol on Coinbase's Base network in the 12 months through July. Mastercard added tools in September to help banks assess AI-initiated transactions, and six major banks published shared principles for agentic commerce — though most live transactions are still controlled demonstrations, with banks still working through agent identity, authorization, fraud, and liability.
Mural says it will use the fresh capital to build out its infrastructure, hire, expand its licensing and compliance footprint, and add new markets. In a funding market that rewards picks-and-shovels plays on the AI trade, Tether's wager is that the bottleneck won't be smarter agents — it will be the plumbing that lets them pay for things without breaking the rules.
By Hamza Faisal
