On October 20, Mural, a New York fintech, closed a $15 million Series A led by Tether, the issuer of USD₮, with North Island Ventures and earlier investors joining. The round brings the company’s total funding to $28 million and, in Mural’s telling, pays for the regulatory and payments plumbing software agents need before they can move money on a person’s or a business’s behalf.
What Tether is buying into is a permissions problem. When a software agent asks to send money, who authorized the instruction, and who answers when it goes wrong? Mural’s answer is an account layer that ties identity, permissions, and compliance to the movement of funds. Its controls are account limits, approved counterparties, and custom approvals on larger payments. Each addresses a different risk: a limit sets how much, a counterparty list sets to whom, and an approval step escalates the rest to a person.
Mural’s customers include Deel, Opera, and Axexo, which use the platform for payroll and remittance products, and end users can hold dollars, stablecoins, and local currency in one account. Since launching its API in 2025, Mural reports $2.1 billion in payment volume across 128 countries, with 2026 volume running nearly six times its 2025 total.
Those figures need careful reading. The volume measures a payments business built on payroll and remittances, where a human starts the transfer. It does not measure software agents moving money on their own, and the company does not separate the two. A payment that passes through Mural is not proof that an agent made a delegated decision. That gap is the test for the whole category: agentic finance becomes real only when the agent, not the person behind it, is the one requesting a payment inside pre-set bounds.
The compliance structure shows how Mural keeps this inside regulation. Mural Technologies is a fintech company, not a bank. Money transmission runs through Mural Networks, a FinCEN-registered money services business with NMLS ID 2744530, and in some states through federally chartered, FDIC-insured banks. That split is why the new capital is earmarked for regulatory and payments infrastructure as much as for expansion: the licenses and bank relationships are part of the product.
Tether’s interest follows its own logic. USD₮ is the largest stablecoin by circulation, and stablecoin payments roughly doubled in 2025 to about $390 billion, with businesses about 60% of that, according to figures Mural’s release attributes to McKinsey and Artemis Analytics. A system that connects accounts, bank relationships, and local and blockchain rails is a distribution surface for a stablecoin issuer, and an authorization layer makes those rails usable by the software that more businesses are starting to let act for them.
The round does not establish that the agent side is real yet. The release offers no audited payment figures, no split between human- and agent-initiated volume, and no list of licensed corridors. Expansion is an intended use of the money, not a completed map. The disclosure that would settle it is how much of the flow is agent-initiated today and how much remains the payroll and remittance business that produced the $2.1 billion.
Source: BTC-Pulse.