Catena Labs

See how Agent Commerce Kit can be used to monetize an MCP server at run-time. https://lnkd.in/eVvFEUYh

We’re excited to welcome Sharda Caro Del Castillo as Catena Labs’ Chief Legal & Business Officer. Sharda brings over 25 years of leadership across legal, compliance, strategy, and operations at Affirm, Airbnb, Square, PayPal, and Wells Fargo. She’s shaped the business strategy and legal frameworks behind some of the most widely used and innovative financial products in the world, and now she’s joining Catena to help build a new kind of financial institution for agentic commerce. As AI agents begin to initiate and manage financial transactions, they raise complex questions around licensing, identity, liability, and compliance. The financial system wasn’t built for the AI era, and making the new agentic economy work will require both technical infrastructure and regulatory clarity. We’re thrilled to have her working with us to build the future of the global economy. She shares what drew her to Catena and how she’s thinking about what comes next in an interview on our blog. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/ecsir4KN

It's great to see the banking industry begin to wrap their minds around the disruptions driven by stablecoins and agentic commerce. Check out this article on the topic by Steve Cocheo in The Financial Brand. https://lnkd.in/eNN6un8N

Our Co-Founder and CEO Sean Neville discusses with VentureBeat why agent interoperability needs better identity standards: There should be an open, transparent way for an agent to say, "this is who I am operating on behalf of, here's my reputation and how you can assess my risks, here's my audit trail" — without vendor lock-in or data leakage. https://lnkd.in/g7sEyTSa

Listen to Sean Neville, our Co-Founder & CEO, on the latest TechCrunch StrictlyVC Download discussing how we're building an AI-native financial institution https://lnkd.in/e7BQtPGF

We're excited to welcome Ed Spencer to Catena Labs as our newest AI Engineer! Ed has been building production-ready AI applications for years, and is bringing that deep experience to help build the foundational infrastructure for the agentic economy: designing autonomous workflows, purpose-built AI agents, and the tools that will enable AI systems to safely and intelligently interact with money. We’re thrilled to have Ed on board at Catena Labs to help shape that future.

Catena Labs Secures $18M to Build First AI-Native Financial Institution Exciting news! We have secured $18 million in funding, led by a16z crypto, to build the first AI-native financial institution. The Dawn of the Agent Economy & Its Challenges AI agents are rapidly becoming independent and powerful economic participants. However, today's legacy financial systems — characterized by slow transactions, high costs, rigid international workflows, and risk frameworks designed for humans, not AI — are fundamentally unprepared for this new reality. Our Solution: An AI-Native Financial Institution We’re addressing these critical challenges directly by creating an AI-native financial institution: purpose-built for AI agents and operated increasingly by AI digital workers alongside essential human collaborators who provide oversight, and underpinned by a commitment to pioneering AI-specific risk management and compliance. The Role of AI-Native Money While our agents can use traditional systems and financial rails, they gain superpowers with AI-native money – stablecoins. Regulated stablecoins (like USDC) enable the near-instant, low-cost, global transactions essential for AI. With AI-native money, agents can unlock new business models and greater prosperity for humans and businesses. The Agent Commerce Kit (ACK) Today we're also sharing the Agent Commerce Kit (ACK) — an open-source initiative identifying patterns and protocols for secure identity verification and compliant financial transactions between agents, humans, and businesses. Explore ACK here: https://lnkd.in/dqePFbUX Our Team & Vision Catena Labs was co-founded by CEO Sean Neville, previously co-founder of Circle and the originator of the USDC stablecoin. Our experienced team brings deep expertise across payments, fintech, AI, and regulated financial services. We're committed to building a transparent, collaborative financial infrastructure. Join Us in Building the Future of Finance We're actively seeking collaborators: • Developers & Innovators: Let’s shape the future of agentic finance together. • Businesses: Let's discuss how your AI agents can leverage advanced financial services. • Talented Individuals: Passionate about the future of AI and finance? We're hiring! Learn more and explore opportunities at https://catenalabs.com. Thank you to all our investors and angels for their belief in our vision: a16z crypto, Breyer Capital, Circle Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Pillar VC, CoinFund, and select elite angels!

We've use Anthropic’s Sonnet 3.5 extensively at Catena Labs, but kept running into practical limitations—rate limits disrupting our workflow, lack of integrated web search capabilities, and the complexity of managing multiple providers. To solve these challenges for our team, we built Super Sonnet Mix, a simple enhanced mix for Sonnet that adds multi-provider reliability and integrated tools. When you hit rate limits, it automatically fails over to the same model on another provider between Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, and Google Vertex. We've also added web search and image generation capabilities. Lastly, it works through both the standard Anthropic API and the OpenAI API, so code changes are minimal (usually just 2 lines). This solution has significantly improved our development workflow, so we're making it available to others. If you love Sonnet like we do but have encountered similar challenges, you might find it useful. Try it out at https://lnkd.in/eHBg-r4Z We're exploring extremely powerful developments in agentic workflows, identity, and payments, and this Super Sonnet Mix has been critical to that work. Looking forward to sharing more about those projects in 2025!

Today marks another step forward for open source AI experiences: DecentAI is transitioning exclusively to open source models for vision, image generation, and chat. This decision reflects our commitment to transparency, user privacy, and the remarkable progress of open source AI technology. Key updates in this release: 🔀 New Model Mixes: Revamped auto-routing mixes of open source models for the best text and image generation AI available 🧩 Model Synthesis: This feature combines responses from multiple models for higher quality outputs 🖼️ The Best Image Generation Models: DecentAI image mode supports the best open source image generation models 🗣️Enhanced Voice Interaction: Enjoy faster response times, additional voices, multilingual support, and hands-free mode 🔐 Privacy-Focused Design: Most AI apps keep your conversations and images on their servers to use as they see fit, but DecentAI chats and images stay on your device 📱Improved Interface: Experience a beautiful new interface Web search capability: Connect models to the web when you want, disconnect them when you don't For our Pro users, we continue to provide access to the most advanced open source models available, including watermark-free image generation through Flux Pro. Free users continue to have access to performant multi-modal open source models and tools for searching the web and getting the news. The future of AI shouldn't be locked behind closed doors. We're proving that open source AI can deliver premium performance while respecting user privacy and choice. This isn't just an update – it's a statement about what AI tools should be. We're grateful to the open source AI community for making this possible, and to our users for supporting this vision of more accessible, transparent AI technology. Download on the App store: https://lnkd.in/eT3GhsaC Download on the Play Store: https://lnkd.in/ejDu4ing