This week, the future of finance is being built in parallel — by founders solving old problems with new infrastructure, and by the institutions smart enough to partner with them early. Samarth Shekhar zooms in on two companies rewiring who gets to hold money and who bears the risk when AI starts spending it.
Frank Schwab looks at where hyper-personalization is taking retail banking next. Our Q&A of the week sits down with Saible, the construction fintech determined to fix a payment system that’s failing an entire industry. And our venture roundup rounds up the capital chasing all of it — from agent-native payments to institutional blockchain infrastructure. Grab your coffee. This one’s worth the full read.
A Q&A with Jarvey Moss from Saible on De-Risking Construction Payment Infrastructure
Construction has always run on trust — and on cash that moves, sometimes unpredictably, through a long chain of hands. Jarvey Moss and Dr Tim Whitehill met at UKREiiF and, within months, decided that trust needed an upgrade. Jarvey had already built and exited Amigo Technology; Tim had spent years inside construction finance and later completed a doctorate on operational resilience in the sector.
Together, in 2023, they founded Saible — payment infrastructure designed to de-risk how construction projects are funded, and to keep money flowing to the people actually doing the work. This week, we sat down with the founders to talk about parallel payment accounts, the human cost of a broken system, and why plug-and-play might be exactly what construction finance has been missing.
1-Tell us about yourself / your co-founder(s).
Saible was founded in the UK in 2023 by Jarvey Moss and Dr Tim Whitehill. Jarvey started out as a musician and tour manager before co-founding Amigo Technology in 2014 (exited in 2022). Tim founded a specialist civil engineering contractor, later running a consultancy focused on helping construction companies operate more efficiently. He then founded the not-for-profit Save Construction Initiative in 2020. Tim recently completed a doctorate in Operational Resilience in UK construction. Jarvey and Tim met at UKREiiF, and founded Saible within a few months.
Read more from the interview here: Saible on Fixing Construction’s Broken Payment Cascade
B2B FinTech @Scale Deal Highlights: Natural & Klaimee.
Samarth Shekhar highlights startups that can help scale financial services by unlocking new customer segments or product offerings via B2B partnerships.
As AI agents become financial actors- booking, procuring, paying on behalf of enterprises- every transaction will need a bank account, a payment rail, and a compliance wrapper. Natural is building that stack with Column as the banking partner, but the infrastructure model is designed to be white-labeled or partnered. Banks that can become the preferred settlement layer for agentic transactions can gain a new deposit and flow business from enterprise AI deployments.
Klaimee is among a slew of players building an insurance product that covers AI agent liability. Chubb, Travelers, and Berkshire are actively excluding such insurance from standard E&O and cyber policies, and the EU AI Act could make coverage a procurement requirement. An insurer that moves early to underwrite this risk through Klaimee‘s certification-first model can gain a first-mover position in a category that will be mandatory for every enterprise deploying agentic AI.
Read on for more on the founders and investors in the news last week. If you are building or backing “what’s next in finance” and want to spread the word with our network of 20K+, reach out to Samarth Shekhar or Frank Schwab.
Hyper-personalization is moving banking beyond standardized products toward context-aware financial guidance.
by Frank Schwab
91% of consumers are more likely to engage with brands that provide relevant recommendations, making personalization a default expectation.
At the same time, 84% of customers value their experience with a company as much as its products or services.
AI, analytics, and real-time data allow banks to anticipate customer needs, deliver proactive advice, and create more meaningful financial journeys.
Banks embracing hyper-personalization could increase customer lifetime value by 20–30% by 2030.
Read more: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7486295382218584064/
VENTURE FINANCING
Klaimee lands $5.5m to insure autonomous AI agents
Klaimee, a Y Combinator-backed InsurTech that provides insurance-backed performance warranties for AI agents, has secured $5.5m in seed funding. The round was led by FundersClub’s Alexander Mittal, with participation from ex/ante, Pioneer Fund, Multimodal Ventures, Kima Ventures, Rebel Fund, Robinhood Ventures, Y Combinator and a group of angel investors. The company was founded to answer a question it believes the market has yet to resolve: who bears the cost when an AI agent makes a mistake? As AI agents evolve beyond copilots into systems that take actions, advise customers, manage sensitive information and operate within enterprise workflows, they introduce failure modes that conventional software never faced. According to the firm, existing Technology E&O and Cyber policies are ill-suited to these risks, having been designed around deterministic software, data breaches and services delivered by humans. The EU AI Act enforces in August 2026, and major insurers including Berkshire, Chubb, and Travelers are winning state approval to exclude AI liability from standard commercial policies, leaving every agent-deploying company exposed. CEO Ines Boutemadja: “Ten years ago, cyber insurance emerged because companies suddenly faced risks that existing insurance products weren’t designed to cover. We believe autonomous AI is creating that same moment again.”
Source: https://fintech.global/2026/07/22/klaimee-lands-5-5m-to-insure-autonomous-ai-agents/
Cordant Emerges From Stealth With $8 Million Seed Round as the Command Center for Financial Infrastructure
NEW YORK, July 21, 2026 (Business Wire) — Cordant today emerged from stealth with $8 million in seed funding co-led by Motive Partners and Oak HC/FT, with participation from Bankless VC, FJ Labs, SignalFire, Quona, Next Stage, Selah Ventures, Flatironx, Nascent Ventures, Silvercircle Ventures and Generative Ventures. Cordant is a command center for payments companies, fintechs and banks operating across fragmented financial infrastructure. The platform ingests signals from payment rails, bank accounts, ledgers, compliance and risk systems, and normalizes them into a shared event model, giving teams a single operational view across their environment without replacing existing infrastructure or moving customer funds. Founded by former Rapyd executives — Eric Rosenthal, Lior Levitt, Sagi Ittah and Juan Jose Huezo — the company is developing the platform with 11 design partners across banking, payments, embedded finance, cross-border transactions, stablecoins and digital assets. Bitso and Paxos joined as investors and design partners. The platform arrives as banks, payment firms and fintechs push to harness AI within controlled and highly regulated environments, while simultaneously managing the ISO 20022 migration and the addition of stablecoin and real-time payment rails. Capital will be used to move the system into production and activate private beta clients.
Natural Raises $30M Series A to Build Payments Infrastructure for AI Agents
SAN FRANCISCO, July 20, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Natural today announced that it has raised a $30 million Series A led by Kirsten Green at Forerunner, with continued participation from all major investors. The round was raised when the company was 193 days old and brings Natural’s total funding to more than $40 million. Investors include Forerunner, Human Capital, Abstract, Bridge, Brex, Mercury, Privy, Vercel, Notion, Increase, Unit, and Figure, alongside angel investors including Akshay Kothari (Notion), Darragh Buckley (Increase), Art Levy (Brex), Pete Koomen (Y Combinator), and others. Natural is building the foundational payments stack for AI agents. Agents are becoming financial actors — booking travel, managing expenses, procuring software, and executing transactions on behalf of users and enterprises. Natural’s stack is designed for a world where the majority of payment-initiating “users” are not human. The company’s wallet and banking services are provided by Column N.A., Member FDIC. CEO Rishi Lalji has stated the company is positioning to compete with Stripe on agent-native payment infrastructure, with architectural decisions designed for dispute resolution, identity, and compliance in agentic contexts.
Augustus Announces $180M Series B at $1B Valuation to Give International Fintechs and Banks Access to the US Dollar
NEW YORK, July 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Augustus, building the Global Dollar Bank, today announced a $180 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by Tiger Global, with participation from Hummingbird, QED, and the founders of Nubank (David Velez), Ramp (Karim Atiyeh), Circle (Sean Neville), and Deel (Alex Bouaziz). Additional investors include Balaji Srinivasan, Soma Capital, Road Capital Management, CMT Digital, Brevan Howard Digital, and Variant. The new funding accelerates Augustus’ mission to dollarize the world — giving financial institutions around the world direct access to dollar accounts and rails through a modern, federally chartered bank. Augustus received conditional OCC approval for a U.S. national bank charter; it already processes billions of euros annually through a regulated Finnish entity and counts Kraken among its customers. Augustus’ API-first platform supports operating and FBO accounts with named virtual accounts. Customers can transact via Swift, ACH, SEPA, and stablecoins. The company is also investing in its proprietary core banking platform Marble, which enables faster settlement times and 24/7/365 availability by deploying AI across the bank’s back office. CEO Ferdinand Dabitz: “The Dollar is the greatest product in the world but its distribution is fundamentally broken. This financing lets us execute on our mission to provide high-quality dollar access to international fintechs and banks.”
Digital Asset Raises $355 Million to Accelerate Canton’s Role as Onchain Infrastructure for Capital Markets
NEW YORK, June 11, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Digital Asset (DA), the creator of Canton, announced a $355 million funding round led by a16z crypto, with participation from 7RIDGE, ABN Amro, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Apollo Funds, BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Citadel Securities, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Hanwha Investment & Securities, HSBC, iCapital, Liberty City Ventures, Optiver, Polychain, R136 Ventures, S&P Global, SBI Group, Smash Capital, SoFi, Tradeweb, and William Blair. FT Partners served as exclusive strategic and financial advisor. The round valued the company above $2 billion. Canton is a layer-one blockchain built to address a central barrier to blockchain adoption in finance: enabling institutions to use shared infrastructure while preserving the privacy, compliance, and control required in regulated markets. The network has more than 700 ecosystem participants. JP Morgan’s Kinexys has initiated a phased rollout to issue JPM Coin natively on Canton throughout 2026. HSBC successfully simulated issuance and atomic settlement of its tokenised deposit service on the network in April. CEO Yuval Rooz: “Blockchain adoption will be defined by practical, production-grade applications in the world’s largest markets.”
This week’s stories—from Saible’s DiPPA to Natural’s agent-native rails, Klaimee’s new insurance category, and the capital behind Cordant, Augustus and Canton—remind us that the most valuable innovation is the kind that quietly removes friction so others can move faster.
Thank you for reading. See you next week with more of the people and platforms rewriting the rules.