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

Tom Brady is making a cautious but deliberate return to crypto. This time, he’s backing Catena Labs, a Boston-based startup aiming to build what it’s positioning as the world’s first AI-native financial institution, according to a report by Front Office Sports. Catena’s pitch is rooted in the idea of agentic commerce: autonomous AI agents that transact on users’ behalf.

Co-founded by Circle’s Sean Neville, best known for co-creating the USDC stablecoin, Catena emerged from stealth with $18 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto division, a16zcrypto. The funding round also saw support from Circle Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Stanford Engineering VF, and Breyer Capital, as well as notable angel investors, including Balaji Srinivasan, Bradley Horowitz, and Kevin Lin, among others.

The project is building “an AI-native financial institution” that would “give AI agents, and the businesses and consumers they serve, the ability to transact safely and efficiently,” Neville said in a statement released last week. Catena plans to use regulated stablecoins like USDC to power AI-driven transactions alongside traditional payment rails. Catena Labs launched the Agent Commerce Kit, an open-source tool designed to help AI systems verify their identity and make payments independently, following its move out of stealth last week.

The firm contends that existing financial systems, from supply chain automation to retail shopping, are not equipped for AI-native interactions. With Brady’s endorsement and backing from some crypto’s most elite firms, it’s staking a big claim at the intersection of AI, finance, and infrastructure. In his prime, Brady played as a quarterback in the NFL and was widely considered one of the greatest of all time, winning seven Super Bowl titles over a 23-season career with the New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Brady’s earlier dive into crypto came through FTX, the now-defunct exchange whose 2022 collapse erased billions in customer funds and sent the industry into a tailspin for over a year. Serving as a paid brand ambassador, Brady endorsed the platform through television commercials and events, earning as much as $30 million in company equity, which later lost its value following prosecutors’ discovery that FTX had misappropriated customer assets to offset trading losses.

The fallout left Brady entangled in a class-action lawsuit and marked one of the highest-profile celebrity endorsements gone wrong. Earlier this month, Brady was cleared in the FTX lawsuit. Prior to Catena, Brady co-founded NFT platform Autograph, which raised $200 million before pivoting from NFTs to focus on digital collectibles.

Terron Gold