Natural Raises $9.8 Million to Build the AI Interface That Makes Software Invisible
November 4, 2025
 byFenoms Start-Ups

Natural has raised $9,800,000 in their Seed round, backed by Abstract, HUMAN CAPITAL, Forerunner, Terrain, Restive, Genius Ventures, and a powerful list of operators including Zach Abrams, Immad Akhund, Eric Glyman, Karim Atiyeh, Guillermo Rauch, Itai Damti, Matt Michaelis, and others. Led by founder Kahlil Lalji, Natural is building something radically simple but massively transformative: a conversational interface that lets users interact with any software - CRM, analytics, docs, dashboards - using natural language instead of menus and clicks. Instead of learning the tool, users just state what they need, and the system executes it. Natural is not an AI feature layered on top of software. It is the beginning of software without interfaces.
Reframing Software: Not “How Do I Use This?” but “What Do I Want to Achieve?”
For decades, software evolution meant adding more capabilities - more views, more dashboards, more buttons, more complexity. Users didn’t get more powerful; software just got harder to operate. Natural flips the script. It removes the interface entirely and shifts the mental model away from step-by-step navigation toward outcome-driven execution. Instead of clicking through multiple dashboards to create reports, pull data, or update systems, a user simply asks: “Show me closed deals over $50K this quarter, grouped by sales rep.” Natural interprets the request, fetches the data, formats it, and delivers the result instantly. Software stops being a task. It becomes a conversation. The interface disappears. The result remains.
Infrastructure Over App: Natural Becomes the Execution Layer across All Tools
Productivity is broken because users switch between dozens of tools to complete a single workflow. The average knowledge worker toggles apps more than 1,200 times per day, losing momentum and clarity every time. Natural sits above the software stack and handles execution. Whether the workflow spans HubSpot, Salesforce, Notion, Looker, Airtable, or proprietary internal systems, Natural becomes the hub where users request, refine, and execute actions - without context-switching. The brilliance is not automation. It’s consolidation. Instead of training users how to operate tools, Natural becomes the layer that controls them. Software becomes accessible, not learnable.
The Next Breakout Startup Doesn’t Add Functionality - It Removes Effort
There is a reason the most transformative companies (Stripe, Figma, Notion) simplify something everyone else made complicated. Many founders build products that help people work faster. The rare founders build products that eliminate work entirely. Kahlil Lalji isn’t trying to build a better productivity tool; he is removing the concept of “using tools” altogether. Here’s the insight most founders miss: people don’t want more control over software. They want software that understands what they want and handles execution. The winning product is the one that removes decisions, not the one that adds options. Natural is not streamlining workflow. It is collapsing it.
Investor Alignment: The Smartest Money in Tech Is Betting on Interface Elimination
This round isn’t random. HUMAN CAPITAL and Forerunner are known for backing category shifts, not incremental upgrades. Abstract and Terrain specialize in backing companies that redefine foundational workflows. The operator roster reinforces that momentum - founders and builders from Mercury, Airbase, Vercel, and other infrastructure-first companies. These investors aren’t betting on another AI wrapper. They’re betting on the new model of software usage: intent → result. Their thesis is blunt: the next generation of software won’t require training. It won’t require navigation. It will simply respond.
A Market in Motion: Knowledge Workers Are Drowning in Software
Knowledge work has reached a breaking point. Users don’t lack tools - they lack momentum. Studies show:
- The average company uses 130+ SaaS tools across teams.
 - Knowledge workers lose 1.8 hours per day just switching between applications.
 - Software complexity costs organizations over $1.4 trillion in lost productivity annually.
 
More software isn’t solving the productivity crisis.
It’s creating it.
Meanwhile, conversational interfaces are exploding:
- Conversational UI is projected to grow at 30.2% CAGR through 2030.
 - 86% of workers prefer conversational access to data over navigating dashboards.
 - Companies adopting AI-driven UI see a 25–40% reduction in workflow execution time.
 
The market isn’t asking for better dashboards.
It is begging for software to get out of the way.
Why Natural Wins: When Software Understands Intent, Users Become Limitless
Other companies in the category are trying to make existing interfaces smarter. Natural eliminates the interface. The “power user advantage” disappears because everyone becomes a power user. Data accessibility is no longer determined by who knows the system best. It’s determined by who can articulate the request - which is everyone. You don’t need to remember where anything lives. You don’t need to understand filters or define fields. You just ask, and it happens. Natural collapses learning, navigation, and execution into a single step. The shortest path to output becomes a sentence.
What’s Next for Natural
With $9.8M secured, Natural is expanding into deeper system integrations and advanced workflow execution. That means handling chained operations, cross-platform automations, and eventually acting as the default front-end for enterprise systems. The roadmap moves from assisting tasks to executing full workflows autonomously. Instead of “Find this data,” Natural will handle, “Run this end-to-end process.” The long-term endgame becomes clear: Natural becomes the universal command interface for software. You won’t need to use tools. You will simply direct outcomes.
Final Thoughts
Most AI startups use language models to enhance software.
Natural uses language models to replace the need to learn software at all.
The future isn't more apps.
The future is fewer interfaces.
The tools that win will be the ones that make humans feel limitless - not the ones that make humans feel like they need more tutorials, more training, or more dashboards. Natural is not trying to improve productivity. It is removing the friction that kills it. The future of work is not about doing more. It’s about doing less and achieving more.
Natural isn't simplifying software.
It’s making the software disappear.









