Tether backs Mural to wire AI agents into the banking system

Mural, a New York payments company founded in 2022 by two former Palantir engineers, said on 20 October that it had raised a $15m (£11.2m) Series A led by Tether, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin. North Island Ventures and existing investors also took part, and the round takes Mural’s total funding to $28m (£21m).

The traction figures are Mural’s own. Since launching its API in 2025, it says, it has processed $2.1bn (£1.6bn) of payments for end users in 128 countries, and its volume so far in 2026 is nearly six times its total for all of 2025. Its named customers are Deel, the payroll and contractor-payments company, the browser developer Opera and Axexo. The release says customers including these three use Mural to build financial products such as payroll and remittance workflows.

Mural presents the new money as funding for ‘agentic finance’: payments started and completed by software agents acting for people or businesses. “The economy is about to gain 10 billion new participants, and none of them are human,” said Sinclair Toffa, Mural’s co-founder and chief executive.

Without the forecast, what Tether has backed is a control layer. Mural’s accounts come with a policy and compliance engine: limits on the account, approved counterparties and extra approval for larger payments, sitting on licensed money transmission and US bank partners. Those controls exist today, while the agent payments they are meant to govern have not been measured in public.

What Mural actually sells

Mural describes itself as “a single system to manage the accounts, payments, identity, and compliance behind financial products”. In practice it supplies the licenses, bank relationships and local and blockchain payment rails that a fintech would otherwise assemble market by market. Mural Technologies is not a bank. Money transmission runs through Mural Networks, a money services business registered with the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and licensed state by state, and in other states through federally chartered, FDIC-insured US banks.

Deel’s endorsement in the release is about local knowledge rather than agents. “We wanted people who know the market where they work and the intricacies of that market,” said Olek Shtanoprud, Deel’s head of payments. “They were on the ground in Colombia, they were thought partners, and they moved fast.”

Four Tether stakes in a week

The Mural round is one of four investments Tether made public between 15 and 21 October. On 15 October Tether Capital took a strategic stake in AIsa, a platform through which AI agents access and pay for data, software and computing, with usage billed in fiat or stablecoins and spending limits set by the business. On 20 October Tether Capital, which Tether calls its independent investment arm, joined the $1.5bn (£1.1bn) Series E of Tenstorrent, the AI chip company led by Jim Keller, at a $6.2bn (£4.6bn) valuation. On 21 October Tether led the pre-seed round of Peso, a Bolivian fintech whose app lets users save, spend and send USDT. None of the four announcements gives the size of Tether’s own stake.

Two of the four, AIsa and Mural, are built around agents paying for things inside limits a business sets. Tenstorrent sells the AI processors and servers that run the models, and Peso extends everyday USDT spending in Latin America. Paolo Ardoino, Tether’s chief executive, tied the Mural deal to the same theme. “As agents start moving money, that connection to the banks, payment networks and compliance systems the world still runs on becomes essential, and Mural is already doing it at scale,” he said.

Where the demand figures come from

Mural’s case leans on third-party estimates. Its release cites McKinsey and Artemis Analytics for the figure that real-world stablecoin payments more than doubled in 2025 to roughly $390bn (£292bn), with businesses accounting for about 60%. That is a payments figure rather than a trading one, and it puts business stablecoin payments at about $234bn (£175bn) last year. Mural’s cumulative $2.1bn is less than 1% of the business share for 2025 alone.

The release says businesses are now accepting payments from AI agents, but it gives no figure for how much of Mural’s own volume agents initiated, and it gives no valuation for the round.

What the controls change

For a company paying contractors in several countries, the product that exists today is a payout rail with compliance attached, the kind Mural’s customers use for payroll and remittance workflows. The agent version moves the rules onto the account itself: a cap, a list of approved counterparties and a threshold above which a payment needs extra approval. Finance teams already set the same kinds of rules on corporate cards and purchase ledgers. Mural’s proposition is that they can be set on an account that software, rather than an employee, draws on.

Tether has put money into that layer before agent payments show up in anyone’s published volumes. Until Mural or its customers report what share of payments software starts, the $15m buys a set of spending controls attached to a payout business whose 2026 volume is already nearly six times last year’s.