Mural Raises $28M to Build Rails for Fintechs and AI Agents

Mural, a New York financial infrastructure company founded by two former Palantir engineers, has raised a $15 million Series A led by Tether, with participation from North Island Ventures and existing investors. The Mural Series A brings total funding to $28 million, following a $5 million seed round in 2022 and earlier pre-seed financing, according to Fortune. The company did not disclose its valuation.

The round is a bet on two things at once. First, that moving money across borders is still slow, expensive, and fragmented for most businesses. Second, that AI agents will soon be moving real money on behalf of people and companies, and someone has to build the controls for that.

The Problem Mural Set Out to Solve

Businesses that offer financial products to customers in multiple countries typically stitch together dozens of tools: bank partners, payment processors, compliance vendors, local payment rails, and increasingly stablecoin networks. Most of those systems were never designed to talk to each other.

Co-founders Sinclair Toffa (CEO) and Chris Fernandes (COO) saw the same pattern as engineers at Palantir, where they connected disconnected data systems for Fortune 100 companies. Their thesis is that payments are the same integration problem, with money on the line instead of data.

For Toffa, the problem is also personal. On a visit to Togo, his grandfather's home country, at age 15, relatives told him remittances from the U.S. could take weeks to arrive and cost as much as 20 percent in fees. That gap between how easily money moves in wealthy markets and how costly it is everywhere else sits at the center of the company's mission. Causeartist covers the same gap in fintechs driving global financial inclusion.

How Mural Works

Mural describes itself as a compliant system of record for fintechs and platforms. In practice, that means one system manages the accounts, payments, identity checks, and compliance behind a customer's financial products. A single account can hold U.S. dollars, local currencies, and stablecoins.

Mural handles the parts that usually slow companies down when they enter a new market:

• Money transmission licenses and regulatory compliance
• Bank partner relationships
• Connections to local payment rails and blockchain rails
• Forward deployed engineers who embed with customers on the ground in each market and launch alongside them

That last point borrows directly from the Palantir playbook. Instead of handing customers an API and walking away, Mural puts engineers inside the launch.

Customers including Deel, Opera, and Axexo use Mural for products such as global payroll and remittances. Opera, for example, uses Mural to pay roughly 26,000 Opera News writers through its MiniPay wallet. Those products sit with other impact fintech companies building tools for a global workforce.

Traction Since the 2025 API Launch

Mural's reported numbers show a company growing quickly from a small base:

• $2.1 billion in payment volume processed since its API launched in 2025
• 128 countries reached by end users
• Nearly six times all of 2025's volume processed so far in 2026
• About 30 employees across New York, Denver, and Bogotá, plus team members in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and Mexico

These figures are company-reported and have not been independently verified.

Why Agentic Finance Is Central to This Round

Stablecoins are the backdrop. Mural cites McKinsey and Artemis Analytics data showing real-world stablecoin payments more than doubled in 2025 to roughly $390 billion. Fortune, citing Alvarez & Marsal, reports stablecoin payments reached roughly $400 billion in just the first eight months of 2026, while Chainalysis found cross-border stablecoin flows totaled $220 billion between July 2025 and June 2026, up nearly 78 percent year over year. Causeartist has been following that shift, including Cedar Money's cross-border stablecoin raise.

The newer angle is agentic finance: businesses are starting to accept payments initiated by AI agents rather than people. That raises a basic accountability question. When an agent moves money, who authorized it, and who is responsible if it goes wrong?

Mural's answer is that its accounts already include the controls a finance team would expect: spending limits, approved counterparty lists, approval requirements on larger payments, and an audit trail on every action. Those guardrails were built for human operators. The company's argument is that they translate directly to agents, which need the same boundaries applied automatically. Mural also offers a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server so developers can connect their agents to its platform.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino framed the investment the same way, telling Fortune that agents "will need access to payment systems that operate around the clock."

What the $15 Million Funds

Mural says the Series A will go toward four priorities:

• Strengthening its infrastructure for moving, storing, and growing money
• Hiring across engineering and operations
• Expanding its licensing and compliance footprint
• Bringing more markets onto what it calls the Global Financial Internet, a connected network of banks, wallets, and financial systems where money moves in real time (outlined in the company's manifesto)

What to Watch

Licensing is the real constraint. Mural is not a bank. Its money transmission services run through Mural Networks, which is registered with FinCEN and licensed in certain U.S. states, with chartered bank partners covering others. Every new market requires new licenses or partners, which is why licensing sits on the use-of-funds list.

Agent controls are untested at scale. Spending limits and approval flows work well for human teams. Whether they hold up when thousands of autonomous agents transact around the clock is still an open question for the entire industry, not just Mural.

Investor alignment. Tether, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin, leading the round signals strategic interest in distribution. Customers will likely want to see how Mural balances that relationship with support for other stablecoins and traditional rails.

Why It Matters for the Impact Economy

Cross-border payments are an equity issue as much as a technology one. Workers paid through global payroll platforms, freelancers in emerging markets, and families relying on remittances bear the cost of slow and expensive rails, often in fees that would be unacceptable in the U.S. or Europe. The same pattern shows up across financial inclusion startups.

Mural's model will not fix that on its own, but infrastructure that lets more fintechs launch compliant products in more markets lowers the barrier for the companies that serve those users directly. If the agentic finance thesis plays out, the same rails could determine who gets access to automated financial services, and who gets left out.