Ex-NFL Star Tom Brady Returns to Crypto With Investment in AI Startup

Tom Brady makes a cautious but deliberate return to Crypto.

This time he supports Catena Labs, a Boston-based startup that is aimed at building what positioning is as the world’s first AI-Native financial institution, according to a report Through Front Office Sports.

The pitch of Catena is rooted in the idea of ​​agent trade: autonomous AI agents who handle users.

Co-founded by Circle’s Sean Neville, best known for co-creating the USDC Stablecoin, Catena from Stealth came with $ 18 million in seed financing led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Crypto Division, A16zCrypto.

The financing round also saw support from Circle Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Stanford Engineering VF and Breyer Capital, as well as remarkable Engel Investors, including Balaji Srinivasan, Bradley Horowitz and Kevin Lin, among others.

The project is building a “an AI-Native Financial Institution” that would give “AI agents, and the companies and consumers they serve, the possibility to handle safely and efficiently,” Neville said in a rack Released last week.

Catena is planning to use regulated stablecoins such as USDC to supply AI-driven transactions with traditional payment rails.

Catena Labs launched the Agent Commerce Kit, an open-source tool that is designed to help AI systems to verify their identity and make payments independently after the move of Stealth last week.

The company argues that existing financial systems, from supply chain automation to shopping in the retail trade, are not equipped for AI-Native interactions.

With the approval of Brady and support from the most elite companies of some crypto, it makes a big claim at the intersection of AI, finance and infrastructure.

Second half

In his Prime, Brady played as a quarterback in the NFL and was generally considered one of the greatest of all time, in which seven Super Bowl titles won during a career of 23 seasons at the New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Brady’s earlier dive in Crypto came through FTX, the Now as an exchanging exchange Whose collapse of 2022 billions of customer funds has erased and the industry sent in a downward play for more than a year.

Brady serve as a paid brand ambassador, Brady the platform endorsed Via television commercials and events, earning no less than $ 30 million in business edition, which later lost its value after the discovery of the public prosecutor that FTX had Suitable customer assets To compensate trade losses.

The Fallout left Brady entangled in a class action right case and marked one of the most famous notes that went wrong. Earlier this month was Brady tidy In the FTX right case.

Prior to Catena, Brady Co-founded NFT platform-signaturePicked up that $ 200 million before he turned NFTs to concentrate on digital collective objects.

Edited by Sebastian Sinclair