Mural Raises 15M for AI agent payments in Tether-Led Round

Tether, the company behind the world's largest stablecoin, is moving deeper into the agent economy. According to CoinDesk, the stablecoin issuer led a $15 million Series A funding round for Mural, a New York payments startup building AI agent payments infrastructure that lets artificial intelligence agents move money on their own.

The round, announced on October 21, brings Mural's total funding to $28 million, following a $5 million seed round in 2022. North Island Ventures and existing investors joined Tether in the Series A, according to the announcement.

Founded in 2022 by former Palantir engineers Sinclair Toffa and Chris Fernandes, Mural gives fintechs and platforms a single account that holds U.S. dollars, local currencies and stablecoins while handling payments, identity verification and regulatory compliance across traditional banking networks and blockchains. Its customers include the payroll platform Deel, the browser developer Opera and the remittance builder Axexo, Dealroom reported.

The numbers behind the raise are striking. Since launching its API in 2025, Mural says it has processed $2.1 billion in payments for end users across 128 countries — and its 2026 volume so far is nearly six times its full-year 2025 total, as reported by Fathom News.

Why Tether is betting on AI agent payments

The investment lands squarely in what the industry calls agentic finance: software agents that initiate and execute transactions on behalf of people and businesses. According to CoinDesk, Mural's infrastructure lets companies set transaction limits, restrict counterparties and require additional approvals for larger payments — controls aimed at the authorization and accountability questions that arise when autonomous software moves money.

Tether chief executive Paolo Ardoino framed the bet as infrastructure necessity in the announcement: as agents begin moving money, he argued, the connection to the banks, payment networks and compliance systems the world still runs on becomes essential. Dealroom reported a similar line from Ardoino, who said agents will need payment systems able to operate around the clock and reach across borders.

The timing reflects a market finding its footing. Stablecoin payments reached roughly $400 billion in the first eight months of 2026, according to Alvarez & Marsal data cited by Dealroom, with cross-border flows hitting $220 billion in the year to June 2026 — up nearly 78% year on year, Chainalysis found. Yet recent live agent transactions have largely been controlled demonstrations, Dealroom noted, with banks still working through agent identity, authorization, fraud and liability. Mastercard added tools in September to help banks assess AI-initiated transactions, and six major banks published shared principles for agentic commerce.

Mural says the new capital will fund global expansion and further investment in regulatory and payment infrastructure for agentic finance, according to Fathom News.

The agent-economy payments race

Mural is not the only startup chasing the machine-commerce stack. Visa, BILL and Billtrust this week launched the first live pilot for trusted AI agent payments between buyer and supplier platforms, letting authenticated agents complete approved invoice payments end to end through supplier portals. Sierra and Stripe have separately gone live with secure voice payments that let conversational agents handle card payments without ever seeing card details.

What distinguishes Mural's pitch is the compliance layer: a single system of record spanning dollars, local currency and stablecoins, with programmable guardrails — account limits, approved counterparties and payment approval rules — designed for agents authorized to move money, as reported by Daily AI Brief. For enterprises experimenting with AI agent payments, that combination of bank connectivity and on-chain settlement addresses the missing link Ardoino pointed to.

The deeper question is whether programmable money can solve the trust problem that card rails cannot. Traditional networks were built for human-initiated purchases, with delays, fees and manual verification steps that sit poorly with automated, high-frequency transactions between software agents. Stablecoins settle near-instantly on public blockchains — a property their advocates argue makes them a natural settlement layer for machine-driven commerce, according to Altcoin Daily.

For now, the guardrails are the product. Mural's bet — and Tether's — is that the winners in AI agent payments will be decided not by who moves money fastest, but by who gives businesses the controls to let agents move it at all.