Mural Secures $15M Series A Led by Tether to Scale Agentic Finance Infrastructure

Mural has secured $15 million in Series A funding led by Tether to scale its infrastructure for "agentic finance," where AI agents and humans share financial accounts. The investment highlights a shift toward unified systems of record that can manage the compliance and identity requirements of non-human participants in the global economy.

What was announced

Mural’s $15 million round, which brings its total capital to $28 million, included participation from North Island Ventures and existing backers. The company provides a compliant system of record designed to bridge the gap between traditional banking and blockchain rails. It allows software companies to offer financial products where users—and the AI agents authorized to act for them—can hold and transact in dollars, stablecoins, and local currencies through a single account.

The platform includes a policy engine that enforces controls such as account limits and approved counterparties, addressing the accountability gap that arises when autonomous agents move money. Since launching its API in 2025, Mural has processed $2.1 billion in payment volume across 128 countries. The company reports that its 2026 volume to date is nearly six times its total for the previous year.

Current customers include Deel, Opera, and Axexo, who use the infrastructure for payroll and remittance workflows. Mural’s model involves "forward-deployed" engineers who embed with customers to navigate local market intricacies, a strategy influenced by the founders' background at Palantir. This approach is designed to help businesses manage the complexities of stitching together disparate financial tools, bank partners, and compliance vendors as they scale.

The companies involved

Mural was founded by Sinclair Toffa and Chris Fernandes, both former engineers at Palantir. The company applies the enterprise-grade integration strategies they developed for Fortune 100 firms to the fintech sector, specifically focusing on the fragmentation caused by businesses using disparate financial tools, bank partners, and compliance vendors. This problem has intensified as real-world stablecoin payments doubled in 2025 to approximately $390 billion.

Tether, the lead investor in this round, is the issuer of USD₮, the most widely used stablecoin in the market. Under the leadership of CEO Paolo Ardoino, Tether has increasingly moved beyond its role as a liquidity provider to become a strategic investor in infrastructure that connects traditional finance with digital assets. Ardoino has noted that Mural’s ability to connect existing bank systems to stablecoin rails is essential as agents begin moving money at scale.

North Island Ventures, which also participated in the round, is a specialist firm focused on the crypto and Web3 ecosystem. The involvement of these firms underscores the growing intersection between stablecoin issuers and the regulatory infrastructure required to make digital assets viable for enterprise-scale payroll and global remittances.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has tracked Tether’s aggressive expansion into global payment infrastructure throughout 2026. This includes its strategic funding of Saber Money to modernize emerging market payments and an investment in EFY Finance to scale institutional stablecoin usage in Latin America. Tether also recently signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Bank of Kazakhstan to drive tokenization innovation. This institutional push aligns with market sentiment; Lydian Research recently found that 72% of consumers favor merchants that accept stablecoins, suggesting a broad appetite for the digital currency rails Mural is building upon.

What this means

The rise of "agentic finance" represents a fundamental shift in how fintech infrastructure must be built. Traditional banking systems were designed for human verification and manual oversight; they are ill-equipped for the speed and volume of transactions initiated by AI agents. Mural’s focus on a unified system of record suggests that the real bottleneck in fintech isn't the payment rail itself, but the compliance and identity layer that sits above it. As stablecoin payments continue to scale, the pressure will mount on legacy providers to either integrate with these agent-ready platforms or risk being excluded from a significant portion of future transaction volume.