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Tether led a $15 million Series A for New York fintech Mural, bringing total funding to $28 million as the company builds accounts and controls for payments by AI agents.
A payment terminal at a retail counter. Photo via Wikimedia Commons. Source
Tether led a $15 million Series A in Mural, a New York financial infrastructure startup that builds accounts, payments and compliance tools for fintechs and platforms, the company announced Oct. 20. North Island Ventures joined existing investors, bringing Mural's total funding to $28 million.
CoinDesk, citing an emailed announcement, and Fortune reported the round independently. Fortune added that Mural declined to disclose a valuation, and that the total follows a $5 million seed round in 2022 plus earlier pre-seed and interim financing.
Mural was founded in 2022 by Sinclair Toffa and Chris Fernandes, both former Palantir engineers. Toffa, who serves as chief executive, worked in Palantir's London office helping large companies connect systems that did not share data, Fortune reported. The company describes itself as a compliant system of record that fintechs and platforms build on to move, store and grow money for their customers, handling accounts, payments, identity and compliance in one stack.
Customers including payroll provider Deel, browser maker Opera and fintech firm Axexo build on Mural for products such as payroll and remittances, according to the funding post. The infrastructure covers licenses, bank relationships, and local and blockchain payment rails. Mural says customers can hold dollars, local currencies and stablecoins in the same account structure.
The company sells that account stack as a way for businesses to avoid assembling payments infrastructure through multiple vendors in each market. Mural's forward-deployed engineers embed with customers during launches, the funding post said. Fortune reported that stablecoin payments reached roughly $400 billion in the first eight months of 2026, citing Alvarez & Marsal, and that cross-border stablecoin flows totaled $220 billion from July 2025 through June 2026, up nearly 78% year over year, according to Chainalysis.
Mural has offices in New York, Denver and Bogota, with about 30 employees across those sites and Argentina, Chile, Ecuador and Mexico, Fortune reported.
Mural's product line includes transaction limits on AI-driven payments, restrictions on permitted counterparties, and additional approval requirements above set thresholds. Those controls are meant to define which payments software can initiate on its own and which still need a human or policy checkpoint.
The company said it has processed $2.1 billion in payment volume for end users in 128 countries since launching its application programming interface in 2025. Payment volume so far in 2026 is nearly six times the 2025 total. Mural cited McKinsey and Artemis Analytics estimates that real-world stablecoin payments more than doubled in 2025 to roughly $390 billion, and said businesses are now accepting payments from AI agents.
"When an agent moves money, someone needs to know who authorized it and who is accountable," Mural wrote. The company said its accounts already apply limits, approved counterparties and approvals on larger payments, with an audit trail on every action.
Tether chief executive Paolo Ardoino pointed to Mural's work connecting enterprise software with bank and stablecoin rails as part of the rationale. "As agents start moving money, that connection to the banks, payment networks and compliance systems the world still runs on becomes essential," he said in the statement Mural cited. In a separate written statement to Fortune, Ardoino said AI agents "will need access to payment systems that operate around the clock and can reach people across the world."
Ardoino did not disclose how much Tether invested, what ownership stake the round carries, or whether Mural's account stack will preferentially route stablecoin settlement through USDT. The companies also have not said whether a Tether-branded stablecoin will appear inside Mural's multi-currency account product.
The round extends Tether's investments outside of USDT issuance. The stablecoin issuer signed a memorandum in Kazakhstan this month to explore a tenge-pegged stablecoin, CoinMarketCap noted, citing its own prior reporting. AI agents made more than 138 million payments through the x402 protocol on Base in the 12 months through July, according to a Chainalysis report CoinMarketCap also referenced.
Mural said it will use the new capital to expand internationally, hire, extend its licensing and compliance footprint, and add markets. The company did not disclose a valuation for the Series A.