One of Tom Brady’s first forays into cryptocurrency ended badly, but that hasn’t soured the former Patriots star on the sector, it seems.
On Tuesday, Brady was named as one of the investors backing a new Boston-based crypto startup called Catena Labs.
Catena, which is aiming to combine artificial intelligence-powered software bots and crypto currency financial services, said it raised a total of $18 million from Brady and some of the top venture capital firms in the country, including a16z crypto in California, Breyer Capital in Texas, and Pillar VC in Boston. Former IBM chief executive Sam Palmisano and former Google vice president Bradley Horowitz also invested.
The investment follows Brady’s endorsement of the failed crypto exchange FTX. Brady was paid a reported $30 million to back the exchange, which collapsed in 2022 with founder Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud. Brady and other FTX endorsers such as David Ortiz and Stephen Curry are still facing a lawsuit from investors who lost money in the collapse, though a judge dismissed most charges in the lawsuit two weeks ago.
Catena was formed in 2022 by Sean Neville and Matt Venables, who were previously a cofounder and a senior executive, respectively, at Circle Internet Group, the Boston cryptocurrency startup that moved its headquarters to New York this year. With more than $60 billion of its USDC cryptocurrency in circulation, Circle remains one of the most successful crypto startups in the world.
Catena aims to become an “AI-native financial institution” that can transact with the coming wave of AI agents “safely and efficiently,” Neville said in a statement.
Boston’s once-active crypto startup scene has been relatively quiet since the collapse of FTX and the resulting sharp drop in the value of leading digital currencies such as bitcoin. Even after President Trump took office promising to encourage the crypto economy, stirring activity in other cities, Boston remained subdued.
Before the Catena deal, Massachusetts-based crypto startups had raised just $3 million so far this year out of $6.4 billion raised by crypto startups nationwide, according to data from research firm Pitchbook.
Brady’s agent, Don Yee, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him @ampressman.
