Mural raises $28M in total funding as Tether leads $15M Series A

Mural was founded by former Palantir engineers to build fiat-to-stablecoin banking rails, the kind of plumbing that lets businesses move dollars and tokens interchangeably. Tether, issuer of USDT, has spent the past two years deploying profits from its reserve holdings into equity stakes across fintech, AI and commodities rather than just minting stablecoins. This Series A marks another step in that strategy, adding a payments startup to a growing portfolio of bets on infrastructure that settles in its own token.

The $15 million lets Mural build out banking and payment rails specifically for AI agents, meaning software systems that need to hold balances and execute transactions without a human approving each one. Businesses deploying autonomous agents for procurement or trading gain a dedicated settlement layer rather than retrofitting legacy bank APIs. Tether secures an equity stake and a foothold in a payments niche still being defined, while rivals building stablecoin infrastructure for enterprise now face a well-capitalized, Tether-aligned competitor.

Tether's move from issuing a stablecoin to bankrolling the companies that route payments through it blurs a line that mattered to crypto's original pitch: open, permissionless rails rather than infrastructure owned by the token's own issuer. If AI agents increasingly settle through Mural, and Mural leans on USDT, autonomous commerce ends up dependent on the balance sheet and reserve practices of a single private company. That concentration is worth watching regardless of how well the product performs.

Mural has not disclosed a public launch date or named banking partners for its AI-agent payment product, so the next marker will be whether the company announces live integrations or additional enterprise clients using the new infrastructure. Also worth tracking is whether Tether's venture arm, which led this round alongside North Island Ventures, follows with further AI-payments bets, a pattern that would confirm this deal as part of a broader strategy rather than a one-off.