Baselayer, a New York-based identity verification and risk infrastructure company, has raised a $35 million Series A led by M13, with participation from Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital, and Matt Thompson of Socure. Alongside the financing, the company launched its Agentic Identity Suite, a platform designed to help financial institutions and businesses verify AI agents, establish their authorization to act on behalf of customers, and manage fraud risks associated with autonomous financial transactions.
Founded in 2024 by CEO Jonathan Awad and CTO Timothy Hyde, Baselayer provides identity and risk management technology to financial institutions, payments companies, Fortune 500 businesses, and government agencies.
The company’s existing platform serves more than 2,300 financial institutions and payments companies, representing approximately one in five financial institutions in the United States, according to Baselayer.
Its technology helps organizations verify businesses and assess risk during onboarding and underwriting. Baselayer reports that its infrastructure has helped customers prevent more than $1 billion in fraud losses.
The latest financing supports the company’s expansion into an emerging category of identity infrastructure designed specifically for autonomous AI systems.
As businesses increasingly deploy AI agents capable of accessing information, executing transactions, and interacting with external services, financial institutions face new challenges in determining whether those agents are legitimate and properly authorized.
Traditional identity verification systems were primarily designed to establish the identities of individuals and businesses. They were not developed to verify autonomous software acting independently on behalf of an individual or organization.
Baselayer’s Agentic Identity Suite is intended to address this gap by providing an interoperable trust layer for AI-driven commerce.
The platform is designed to help institutions determine which AI agent is initiating a transaction, whom the agent represents, and whether it has permission to perform a particular action.
It uses cryptographic verification to establish agent identity and authorization, enabling banks, merchants, and other financial infrastructure providers to evaluate transactions initiated by autonomous software.
The company is also developing what it describes as an agentic fraud consortium, extending its existing identity and risk infrastructure to emerging forms of AI-related fraud.
The introduction of the Agentic Identity Suite comes as major payments and commerce companies expand their support for AI agents.
In its announcement, Baselayer cited Stripe’s report that 70% of commands accessing data through its API came from AI agents as of June 2026. The company also pointed to agentic commerce developments involving Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Shopify.
These developments are creating demand for identity infrastructure that can distinguish legitimate, authorized AI activity from potentially fraudulent or unauthorized transactions.
Baselayer is working with AI agent developers, financial institutions, payments companies, and technology providers to develop its agentic identity and risk capabilities.
Organizations involved in its ecosystem include FIS, Prove, Socure, Exa, Parallel Web Systems, Natural, Nevermined, and Lane.
The company is also participating in initiatives intended to establish technical standards for AI agent authentication and identity verification.
These include the FIDO Alliance Authentication Working Group, Legal Context Protocol, and x402 Identity Working Group, alongside organizations such as Cloudflare, Google, Visa, and Mastercard.
The new capital will support Baselayer as it expands its existing identity infrastructure into autonomous commerce and develops additional technology for verifying agent-initiated financial activity.
M13, which led the financing, manages approximately $2.2 billion in assets and has previously backed 18 companies at the seed or Series A stage that subsequently achieved unicorn status.
KEY QUOTES:
“Every era of commerce has required a new trust layer, but historically that infrastructure gets built only after fraud and abuse make the problem impossible to ignore. Agentic commerce is moving too fast for the industry to repeat that mistake. We already help one in five U.S. financial institutions answer, ‘Can I trust this business?’ Now we’re building the infrastructure they need to answer, ‘Can I trust this agent, who does it represent, and what is it allowed to do?'”
Jonathan Awad, Co-Founder and CEO of Baselayer
“Agents don’t carry ID, and the infrastructure built to verify humans and businesses simply doesn’t recognize them. Static fraud controls end up blocking good customers while sophisticated attacks walk through. We built the Agentic Identity Suite so any institution can know, cryptographically, which agent it’s dealing with, who that agent represents, and whether its own agent can safely proceed with any transaction.”
Timothy Hyde, Co-Founder and CTO of Baselayer
“AI agents are rapidly becoming economic actors, but the identity infrastructure underneath commerce was never designed for software that can open accounts, make purchases, move money, or enter into transactions on someone else’s behalf. That creates an enormous new trust problem, and we believe identity will become one of the foundational infrastructure layers of the agentic economy. What made Baselayer especially compelling is that Jonathan and Timothy are not starting from a whiteboard. They already have a network spanning more than 2,300 financial institutions, deep risk data, and infrastructure in production today. They have the distribution and the underlying trust graph to become the system institutions rely on to know not just who they are dealing with, but which agents are authorized to act for them.”
Karl Alomar, Managing Partner at M13
