MoonPay Acquires Dawn Labs, Launchs AI Trading Agent That Turns Ideas Into Live Strategies

By Lidia Yadlos

MoonPay is moving deeper into AI-native finance — this time by collapsing the gap between idea and execution.

The company announced it has acquired Dawn Labs and launched Dawn CLI, a new AI-powered trading tool that lets users describe a strategy in plain English and have it automatically built, tested, and executed across supported markets.

The move signals a clear direction: trading infrastructure is shifting from manual workflows to autonomous systems.

From Idea to Execution, Instantly

At its core, Dawn CLI is designed to remove the technical barrier behind active trading. Instead of stitching together research tools, writing code, and managing execution manually, users can input a strategy in natural language — and the system handles everything that follows.

That includes:

• Surfacing relevant data and signals

• Generating trading code

• Running simulations and backtests

• Executing trades autonomously

It’s a full-stack trading engine built around AI agents, not human workflows.

“The team at Dawn Labs have made the most complex parts of active trading accessible to anyone with an idea,” said Ivan Soto-Wright, CEO of MoonPay. “With Dawn, traders can direct AI agents to develop and execute sophisticated trading strategies autonomously.”

Built for the New Wave of Traders

Prediction markets and event-driven trading have exploded over the past year, with platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi attracting a new class of users — traders who operate across social signals, real-time narratives, and multiple venues.

But the infrastructure hasn’t kept up. Building competitive strategies still requires expertise across research, engineering, and portfolio management — a combination few users have. Dawn CLI is built to compress that entire stack into a single interface.

“We built Dawn to address the fragmentation traders face across research, strategy development and execution,” said Neeraj Prasad, founder of Dawn Labs and now Chief Engineer of MoonPay Labs. “Competing effectively has required expertise across multiple disciplines at once. Dawn brings those capabilities into a single autonomous system.”

The Team Behind Dawn

Dawn Labs was founded in 2025 by Neeraj Prasad, whose background spans machine learning, trading systems, and infrastructure.

A graduate of MIT, Prasad previously worked across companies including Waymo, Microsoft, Citadel, and Reservoir Labs — covering everything from autonomous systems to quantitative trading and deep learning infrastructure.

With the acquisition, Prasad and the full Dawn team are joining MoonPay to build out its AI-native infrastructure strategy.

MoonPay’s Bigger Bet on AI

Dawn CLI doesn’t exist in isolation — it’s part of a broader push by MoonPay to build programmable financial infrastructure for both users and AI agents.

Over the past year, the company has rolled out:

• CLI-based tooling for developers

• AI agents with hardware-secured signing

• The MoonAgents Card, enabling stablecoin spending via Mastercard

• The Open Wallet Standard, designed to connect agents across chains and frameworks

Each step has moved closer to a system where software — not just users — can interact directly with financial rails. Dawn CLI extends that vision into trading.

Where This Is Going

The shift is straightforward: trading is becoming less about tools and more about systems.

Instead of manually executing strategies, users are defining intent — and letting AI handle the rest.

For a market increasingly driven by speed, data, and automation, that shift could redefine who gets to participate — and how.

MoonPay’s acquisition of Dawn Labs is less about adding a feature and more about positioning itself inside that transition.

Published on MoonPay

MoonPay Acquires Dawn Labs, Launchs AI Trading Agent That Turns Ideas Into Live Strategies