From Agentic Payments to AI Infrastructure: This Week’s Startup Funding

FinTech startup Natural has raised $9.8 million in seed funding to build payments infrastructure for “agentic payments,” enabling software agents to transact on behalf of businesses and users. The round was co-led by Abstract and Human Capital, with participation from leading FinTech and artificial intelligence (AI) investors.

Natural is re-architecting the payment stack for a future where transactions are executed not by people but by autonomous software agents. “The method by which payments are executed is shifting from human execution to agentic execution,” said Kahlil Lalji, co-founder and CEO of Natural told PYMNTS in an interview. “There’s never been a time when so much payment volume will change medium, and that creates a chance to reinvent who is involved in the payment stack” he added.

Unlike most startups and incumbents focused on consumer checkout, Natural is concentrating on automation within B2B and embedded payment workflows. “All the attention right now is on consumer checkout. That’s a market we don’t want to play in. We’re focused instead on B2B and embedded use cases,” Lalji told PYMNTS.

The company’s early design partners span industries such as logistics, property management, procurement, healthcare and construction, sectors where agents can source, negotiate and pay vendors or contractors in real time. The new funding will go toward expanding engineering talent and signing new bank and payout partners as Natural moves toward general availability in 2026.

Natural is keeping its team deliberately lean. The company currently has five employees and expects to remain no larger than 10 by the end of the year, with most of the hires focused on engineering talent, Lalji said.

Augmented Intelligence Raises $20M

Neuro-symbolic AI startup Augmented Intelligence (AUI) has raised $20 million in a SAFE round at a $750 million valuation cap, bringing its total disclosed funding to about $60 million. The company combines neural networks, known for pattern recognition and language fluency with symbolic reasoning, the structured logic traditionally used in rule-based systems. That blend allows AUI’s models to not only predict the next word in a sentence like large language models (LLMs) but also follow consistent rules and verify outcomes, a capability standard transformer-based LLMs lack.

While LLMs excel at generating language, they struggle with reasoning and factual accuracy because they rely purely on statistical correlations. AUI’s hybrid approach adds a logical layer that can reason about cause and effect. Investors see it as a possible path toward the next phase of AI, systems that can explain and justify their decisions rather than simply producing text.

Nvidia Backs Poolside’s $2B Round

Nvidia is reportedly investing up to $1 billion in Poolside, a Paris-based startup developing AI models for software creation. The funding, part of a $2 billion round valuing the company at $12 billion, reflects Nvidia’s deeper push into developer tooling and AI-native software ecosystems. Bloomberg reported that Poolside’s model converts natural-language prompts into full code bases, reducing time from concept to deployment.

Unlike coding copilots such as GitHub Copilot or Replit, Poolside operates more like an autonomous developer with an ability to plan, generate and debug entire applications with minimal human input. The company is also building a marketplace where developers can publish, reuse and monetize AI-generated code components.

Crusoe Secures $1.38B for AI Infrastructure

Denver-based Crusoe Energy Systems has raised $1.38 billion at a $10 billion valuation to expand its AI-data-center operations, including a 1.2 gigawatt campus in Abilene, Texas.

The company converts stranded natural gas and renewable energy into electricity for AI workloads, cutting both costs and carbon emissions.