Although losses were incurred due to the collapse of FTX, Tom Brady is making a return to the crypto sector. This time, an investment has been made by him in a fintech startup that is centered around artificial intelligence.
Tom Brady is making a careful yet intentional return to the crypto space.
This time, he is supporting Catena Labs, a Boston-based startup aiming to establish what Front Office Sports describes as the world’s first AI-native financial institution.
Catena presents agentic commerce—where autonomous AI agents conduct transactions for users—as the foundation of its value proposition.
Sean Neville, best known for co-creating the USDC stablecoin at Circle, co-founded Catena and helped bring it out of stealth mode after securing $18 million in seed funding. a16zcrypto, the crypto division of Andreessen Horowitz, led the funding round.
Participation in the funding round was also provided by Circle Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Stanford Engineering VF, and Breyer Capital, along with several prominent angel investors such as Balaji Srinivasan, Bradley Horowitz, and Kevin Lin, among others.
The project is developing an AI-native financial institution to enable AI agents—as well as the businesses and consumers they support—to conduct transactions securely and efficiently, according to a statement Neville released last week.
Catena plans to use regulated stablecoins such as USDC to facilitate AI-driven transactions alongside conventional payment systems.
After emerging from stealth last week, Catena Labs introduced the Agent Commerce Kit—an open-source tool designed to help AI systems authenticate their identities and execute payments autonomously.
The firm argues that current financial infrastructures—from supply chain automation to retail commerce—lack the design to support AI-native interactions.
Backed by Tom Brady and several leading crypto firms, the project takes a bold position at the intersection of artificial intelligence, finance, and technological infrastructure.
The Latter Half
At his peak, Brady played quarterback in the NFL and earned recognition as one of the greatest players of all time. Over his 23-season career with the New England Patriots and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, he secured seven Super Bowl titles.
Brady first entered the crypto space through FTX, the now-bankrupt exchange whose 2022 collapse wiped out billions in customer assets and sent the industry into over a year of turmoil.
FTX hired Brady as a paid brand ambassador, and he promoted the platform through televised ads and public appearances. Reports say he received up to $30 million in company equity, which ultimately became worthless after prosecutors revealed that FTX had misused customer funds to cover trading losses.
The fallout pulled Brady into a class-action lawsuit, marking one of the most prominent cases of a celebrity endorsement gone wrong. However, earlier this month, the court cleared him of any wrongdoing in the FTX case.
Before launching Catena, Brady co-founded the NFT platform Autograph, which raised $200 million in funding before shifting its focus from NFTs to digital collectibles.
