Kristin Myers: Now, every time you hit send on a payment, a dozen systems have to agree with each other. That’s banks, card networks, compliance checks and currencies. Now imagine the person hitting send. It’s actually not a person at all. It’s an AI agent. Well, this month some of the biggest banks in America started blocking those agents from customer accounts. But my guest is building the accounts they’re supposed to use. He learned how broken cross-border money is from sending it to family in Togo. But first, let’s take a look at the company. The road from idea to the opening bell starts right now.
Moving money around the world has never been easier. But behind that simple send button, there are banks, payment networks, compliance systems, different currencies, different countries, and a lot of technology that was never designed to work together. That’s the problem Sinclair Toffa and his co-founder Chris Fernandes saw. The two former Palantir engineers had spent years connecting complex systems for some of the world’s biggest companies. Then they looked at finance and saw the same problem.
So they built Mural. The idea is to give fintechs and other platforms one system for managing accounts, payments, identity and compliance, while Mural handles the bank connections, licenses and payment rails underneath. And that includes both the old financial system and the new one. Mural connects traditional banking rails with stablecoins and blockchain networks, allowing its customers to move and manage money across markets.
And money is already moving. Since launching its API in 2025, Mural says it has processed more than $2 billion in payment volume for end users across 128 countries. But now comes a much bigger bet: AI agents. Today, a person tells the bank where to send the money. Tomorrow, an AI agent could pay a bill, buy something, or move money on your behalf. And that creates a massive new question. Who gave permission? How much can it spend? And who’s responsible when something goes wrong?
Mural is building the infrastructure to answer those questions, with spending limits, approved counterparties, payment approvals and an audit trail designed to control how both humans and AI agents move money. And investors are buying into that vision. Tether just led Mural’s $15 million Series A, bringing total funding to $28 million.
But here’s the challenge. The financial system was built for people. So can Mural become the financial infrastructure for a world where billions of AI agents can move money too? And if agentic finance really does take off, can Mural become the system of record underneath it? From Startup to Stock Exchange, Mural co-founder and CEO Sinclair Toffa is next.
And joining us here at the desk is Sinclair Toffa, co-founder and CEO of Mural. Sinclair, thank you so much for joining us today.
Sinclair Toffa: Thank you for having me.
Kristin Myers: So let’s start out with the entire problem. What does it actually take to move a dollar from, let’s say, here in New York to somewhere in South America?
Sinclair Toffa: Yeah. So typically when you move money from here in New York to somewhere in South America, it’s going through a network of different banks, payment providers, card networks, and it goes through a variety of different compliance platforms as well. And you have a lot of checks along the way. What a lot of people don’t realize is that there’s this tremendous fragmentation, where a lot of these different systems were not built to fully speak to each other.
The systems here in the US are very different from the systems in South America. And so you have SWIFT, for instance, which is one of the largest correspondent messaging systems around the world, and it was built 50 years ago. And so you’re seeing this new evolution that’s coming to these messaging networks to make it easier to move money from one place to another.
Kristin Myers: Okay. So your grandfather is actually from Togo, and this is part of, I guess, the origin story of Mural a bit, it sounds like. So talk to us about what sending money over to Togo actually taught you that you’re using now with Mural.
Sinclair Toffa: So yeah, my grandfather’s from Togo in West Africa, and my parents met in Argentina, and my dad is French. So I always grew up cross-border, in between the countries. And so growing up, we would use Western Union, we’d use banks, we’d use pretty much all the different platforms out there. And I remember back in the day when I was younger, 14, 15, transfers might take a couple days, even a couple of weeks.
And then whenever money was lost, you’d have to call up the bank or check in with Wells Fargo, Western Union and say, “Where did the money go?” And then on top of that, oftentimes you would see these hidden fees that you didn’t know upfront. And so sometimes it might be 5%, 10%, 15% in some cases.
And that was a very eye-opening experience for me when I went to Togo for the first time and realized how fortunate I was to have grown up in the US and in France, to be connected to various bank accounts and to what we call the global financial network. And really, that dollar access is still an unsolved problem. And that was the seed of inception that was born back then, and I’m very grateful to be pursuing the Mural mission now, directly tied to that.
Kristin Myers: So you have a co-founder, Chris Fernandes, and you both met at Palantir. Actually, you were even roommates. How did your experience at Palantir shape what you guys are doing now?
Sinclair Toffa: So when Chris and I joined Palantir, this was around 2017, 2018. Our task was to go directly within the business, understand their biggest problems, and then deploy Palantir software within the business. And this was around the days when a lot of people were migrating from data on premise, living in physical servers, to the cloud. And so a lot of companies had a fragmentation of data, different data providers, a very similar problem to what we’re seeing right now with money movement.
And Chris and I specifically focused on how we can bring together all of these different data tools that don’t speak to each other and then solve the business’s toughest problems. This was across auto manufacturing, aircraft manufacturing, supply chain, for instance. And then we’d unify the data securely into one place within the customer’s cloud and allow them to launch different data applications on top of that foundation. So it was a way for them to become more efficient at using their data and in solving problems. And so that’s what we did. We would go on site with a customer.
Kristin Myers: So talk to us a little bit about clients. What does a fintech company get from Mural that perhaps it’s not getting from the banks?
Sinclair Toffa: So on average, an average enterprise is managing money across five different banks, 40 different bank accounts and 12 different payment providers. So as you can imagine, they have a large finance team. They are stitching together all of these different banks, all of these different payment providers. And so that fragmentation really grows over time.
And the way we’ve approached this is, one, we have a forward-deployed engineering team that actually goes on site, meets with the customer and understands what their most complex problems are. How do we insert the Mural API into their existing infrastructure? So it is not a rip and replace. It is augmenting what they already have. The second thing is we have a very robust and secure API that allows them to directly integrate that into their existing banks and payment providers and unify everything into what we call a compliant system of record.
And that compliant system of record is where we abstract away the complexity of needing to manage all these different bank accounts across different jurisdictions that, once again, don’t speak to each other. And then we handle the underlying licensing, the underlying compliance. Every country has a different posture when it comes to regulatory and compliance, especially when it comes to digital assets. So we abstract that complexity. We build it into the software so it updates as regulations change across Brazil, US, France, you name it.
And then the business focuses on launching new financial products on top of that. So a product, for instance, could be a B2B supplier vendor product. It could be a neobank that is building for families in Guatemala or Mexico to receive remittances from the US down into Latin America. And so it’s really exciting to see them build these applications in order to acquire new customers or retain the customers that they already have.
Kristin Myers: So let’s talk a little bit about that unity, because you are working in dollars and local currencies, and then you’re also working in stablecoins and digital assets. So why does a business need all three of those essentially in order to make some of these processes work?
Sinclair Toffa: That’s a good question. So the world is becoming even more global, and we’re moving from a world where people traditionally interact mainly in one country to a world where people are doing business worldwide. And so what that means is we wanted to create a very simple abstraction, what we call the Mural Global Account. And that account handles all of these different currencies under the hood. They could be fiat currencies like Mexican pesos, Brazilian reais, US dollars, or they could be stablecoins, USDC, [unclear: “Usdc”].
We believe that the number of networks is going to keep growing. The number of stablecoins is going to keep growing as well. And at the end of the day, for our customers, for the business, they don’t want to manage that complexity. They don’t necessarily care whether it’s a stablecoin or a fiat dollar, but rather what is the actual amount that’s being stored. And how can they make that as easy as possible for their end users? Very similar to how on the back end, when you have different cloud providers, AWS, Google Cloud, you name it, and different databases, all of that is abstracted away. That is exactly what we do here.
And the way we’ve built our stack is very much in a blockchain-native way. So it is very different from the existing fintech incumbents, where their stack is mainly a fiat-native stack. Their stack has been built over the past 5 to 15 years on top of legacy banking infrastructure, and we have built it on top of real-time infrastructure, which gives you that speed, and it gives you that security using cryptographic signatures and more. And so we feel that this stack is really the stack of the future. And really the stack for agents. Agents need real time. They cannot operate in the 9 to 5 banking window. And you have 200-plus banking holidays. Imagine an agent taking a holiday.
Kristin Myers: Now, last month, Axios reported that major US banks were finding outside AI agents inside customer accounts. Some appeared to take actions that the customer had never even asked for. So how did they get in? Well, mostly the old-fashioned way. People handed over their usernames and their passwords. And the banks’ response was fast. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that the bank will restrict outside agents. Morgan Stanley, Citi and Bank of America are restricting them as well, though Morgan Stanley says it has not seen rogue agents on its own platforms.
Now, most banks are moving towards read-only access. That means the agent can look, but it cannot touch. So here’s the problem: an agent that can only look but can’t pay your bills. So who gives agents a safe place to spend? That’s the question my guest is betting his company on. We’re back now with Sinclair Toffa, co-founder and CEO of Mural. So, Sinclair, before I get into the AI agents, I want to quickly talk about your raise. So $2.1 billion processed since your API launched this year, running nearly six times last year, and Tether just led your Series A, $15 million. Congratulations. I want to ask what’s driving some of that growth, and why did you decide to partner with Tether for that Series A round?
Sinclair Toffa: So as a business, we’ve been very focused on developing our technology, and we have spent a lot of time building that underlying connectivity between all of these different banking systems. We have grown the team quite substantially last year, [unclear: “from a 15% to a 30 to 30% team”], and we’ve really expanded our global footprint. That includes licenses, that includes our compliance posture and more. And we’ve been growing a lot on the customer side. And as such, we’ve decided to scale up the team with a capital raise.
And Tether has been a very strong partner to us. They’re the [unclear: “first”] stablecoin issuer in the world, they have an incredible global footprint, and they have been a strong business and distribution partner to us. What you may be noticing is Tether is moving more institutional and is looking to partner with us to really go after various businesses and even governments, countries who are looking to launch new real-time financial products.
Kristin Myers: So let’s talk now about those AI agents that we were just hearing about. So banks, as we mentioned, are blocking these AI agents from customer accounts. In your mind, is that the right thing to do? Should they be doing that?
Sinclair Toffa: You know, this reminds me a lot of the early days of cloud. When people were just shifting over to cloud, there were all of these security concerns. How do you secure access to the cloud? How do you make that transition seamless? We are in a very similar moment right now, transitioning over into agents. And what people are doing right now is they are using a consumer agent app like [unclear: “Muse”] or Grok, and there are hundreds of them at this point, and they’re connecting their bank accounts through Plaid.
And when you look at Plaid, Plaid is amazing software, a great company, really designed for human use. What you really don’t want to do is connect your existing bank accounts to the agents. And so that is something that we have to stop doing, and instead transition to a new state where we are actually provisioning bank accounts and provisioning wallets for agents specifically.
Kristin Myers: So say more about that, because you’ve argued that AI agents should have their own, I guess, bank accounts. What does that even look like for me as the customer? How does that even work with what I’m trying to do, instead of connecting my account through ChatGPT to my bank account, having the AI agent have its own account instead?
Sinclair Toffa: So the very first place that’s going to start is wallets for agents. It’s going to take some time for the banks to catch up. In the medium term, wallets are a very lightweight way of creating a wallet, then topping it up from your bank account and adding a policy to that wallet. And so you can imagine, very similar to a Venmo balance, for instance, where you have a dedicated wallet and you can transfer from your Chase account or Wells Fargo account, send in $100 or $500, and then apply a policy in terms of how much your agent can spend.
And so you can imagine having these dynamic wallets, where you can say, “Okay, agent, please buy groceries. Please pay this web developer, for instance, in Argentina. Please pay for this hotel that we’re staying at in Mexico.” And it’s going to start with smaller amounts: $50, $100, $200. As people build up trust with their agent, over time those amounts are going to scale.
Now, on the flip side, businesses are going to have to prepare for this, because now you have agents transacting on behalf of individuals. And so businesses are going to want to capture some of that traffic. So now, on the business side, when you are accepting a payment from an agent via checkout, for instance, or it could even be a bank transfer or an international bank transfer, you will want to know: Who is that agent? Who are they acting on behalf of? And so then that opens up something similar to KYC, Know Your Customer, and KYB, Know Your Business. Now, Know Your Agent.
Kristin Myers: Okay. And this feels like a virtual I, Robot, but only for banking. Okay. So you’re mentioning that there are going to be spending limits, that there needs to be some sort of scale to build up that trust. But I’m curious to know what happens if and when an agent gets it wrong, because that is, of course, at some point going to happen. Who pays for that mistake?
Sinclair Toffa: So a lot of what we built at Mural was to handle the failure edge cases: sending to the wrong account, wrong currency, wrong amount. There’s a foreign exchange currency failure, for instance, when you’re swapping to another currency, or the bank returns the funds, or you’re processing a refund. We built all of that for a lot of the cross-border edge cases, and all of that infrastructure that we’ve built up, we’re now reusing for agents as well. And so we can handle refunds, for instance. We can handle recalling the funds.
And a lot of that is built through software, built through policies that you can apply. Those policies are very important, along with being able to detect when fraud happens, how you recall the funds, and how you add a risk engine on top of the transactions. That is how we solve for this. It’s going to require a lot from our business and from the industry, quite frankly. And that’s something that people are forgetting about. It needs to be part of the core infrastructure, and it cannot be a bolt-on, add-on.
Kristin Myers: So let’s talk a little bit about your scale. You guys are setting your sights on Argentina. And I see why. Latin America, why South America?
Sinclair Toffa: Latin America was one of the first regions to really adopt stablecoins. And the reasons they needed to adopt stablecoins were high currency volatility, lack of dollar access, and really being able to connect into the US financial system. And so we saw tremendous growth in Latin America. Four and a half years ago, when we started the business and we doubled down on the region, it was the fastest-growing region in the world from a stablecoin adoption standpoint. And naturally, we expect it to continue to be one of the fastest-growing regions.
When it comes to Argentina, when you think about Argentina, it’s very chat-based, and a lot of Latin America runs on WhatsApp. And so you can imagine a lot of the financial transactions moving from mobile apps and portals to WhatsApp-based, where you’re doing the identity verification and a lot of the payments over WhatsApp. We’re just seeing this natural adoption happening right now as we speak. Our mission is to connect as many businesses and as many countries to the global financial internet, and we want to focus on the regions that have rapid growth.
Kristin Myers: So I want to ask about the difficulties of scaling, particularly in a banking industry, because it is so heavily regulated, and you guys are pushing into an area where you’re not only considering digital assets and stablecoins, which, for some banks, is a new frontier, but now adding on top of that agentic AI as well. So has there been any sort of difficulties as you guys have been trying to expand, considering all of those compliance issues and regulatory issues?
Sinclair Toffa: So at the end of the day, it comes down to trust. How can we make sure that our financial institutions, our customers, our partners can trust us and trust the ecosystem? And when it comes to trust, security is paramount. What security means to us is building in security as part of the core software, the core system of record, and making sure that there’s an audit log at every single step. We built that directly into the software, with the top engineers in the world as part of our team.
Then what we also did was we got the licensing. We acquired the licenses needed to work directly with the banks. And along with that, we do all of the, you know, we’re SOC 2 Type II compliant, for instance. We do all of these very rigorous audits and security tests to pass those thresholds. And that is how we build trust, by heavily investing in security. We believe that investing in cybersecurity now is going to pay off dividends, especially as everyone’s thinking about security. How do you make sure that the existing infrastructure is compatible with what’s to come?
Kristin Myers: So I have to ask you, because we have about a minute left, we’re on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, I ask everyone that sits in this chair this question. Do you ever think about going public, ringing that bell right over there? And if so, when do you think a day like that might come?
Sinclair Toffa: I love that question. Our focus is building a force-of-nature team and making sure that we connect as many businesses, as many countries to the global financial internet. And what that means is we have very ambitious plans to grow as rapidly as possible. And that is what we’re laser-focused on.
Kristin Myers: All right. Thank you so much. Sinclair Toffa, co-founder and CEO of Mural.
