a16z-crypto
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The Houseparty Guy Got Burned Twice. Now He Wants You to Own the Group Chat.
Ben Rubin built Meerkat and Houseparty, watched both die, and decided the problem was ownership. Towns Labs is his answer: a messaging protocol where the community holds the keys, not the landlord.
Catena Labs
Catena Labs is a Boston-based fintech building what it calls the first AI-native financial institution - a regulated bank and governance platform designed for AI agents that autonomously send and receive money. Founded in 2025 by Circle co-founder and USDC co-creator Sean Neville, Catena pairs agent identity, deterministic spending policies, and audit trails with account management and stablecoin, card, ACH and wire payment rails. It also open-sourced the Agent Commerce Kit (ACK), a set of protocols for agent identity and payments built on W3C web standards.
Halliday
Halliday is a San Francisco blockchain infrastructure company building the Agentic Workflow Protocol, a system that lets developers create onchain financial applications without writing smart contracts. Its flagship product, Halliday Payments, gives developers a single interface for fiat onramps, cross-chain bridging, swaps, and offramps. Backed by a16z crypto across both its seed and Series A rounds, Halliday has raised $26 million total and works with teams including DeFi Kingdoms, Avalanche, ApeCoin, Story Protocol, and Metis.