- Baselayer raised $35 million to build identity checks that verify AI agents before they can transact.
- The round lands seven weeks after Baselayer’s previously reported $20 million Series A.
- More than 2,300 financial institutions already use Baselayer’s tools to check whether a business is real.
AI agents don’t carry a driver’s license or a bank statement. They’re already opening accounts, moving money and buying things on someone else’s behalf, and most of finance still has no clean way to ask who they’re actually working for.
Baselayer, a New York identity and risk infrastructure company, wants to be the one answering that question. It has raised $35 million in a Series A round led by M13, with participation from Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital and Socure’s Matt Thompson.
“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?” said Jonathan Awad, Baselayer’s co-founder and chief executive.
Baselayer was founded in 2023 by Awad and Timothy Hyde, its chief technology officer. The company already sells “Know Your Business” tools — the checks a bank runs to confirm a counterparty is real — to more than 2,300 financial institutions and payments companies, and says it has helped customers prevent over $1 billion in fraud losses.
It’s now extending that graph to cover the agents transacting on those businesses’ behalf.
The gap is structural
Traditional fraud tools were built to recognise people and companies, not autonomous software acting on their behalf.
“Agents don’t carry ID, and the infrastructure built to verify humans and businesses simply doesn’t recognise them. Static fraud controls end up blocking good customers while sophisticated attacks walk through,” Hyde said.
The timing tracks a real shift. Stripe has said roughly 70% of the API requests developers used to make by hand are now issued by agents, and Shopify quietly turned on agentic sales channels by default for more than a million merchants earlier this year. Visa, Mastercard and American Express have each shipped their own agent commerce protocols in the past year.
McKinsey estimates agentic commerce could redirect $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global retail spending by 2030. None of that works if no one downstream can tell a legitimate agent from a stolen one.
Karl Alomar, managing partner at M13, says the appeal wasn’t a pitch deck idea: “They already have a network spanning more than 2,300 financial institutions, deep risk data, and infrastructure in production today.” M13’s broader portfolio spans consumer and fintech bets including Lyft, Ring and Daily Harvest, though this is now its second stake in Baselayer specifically within three months.
The infrastructure race behind agentic commerce
Baselayer is also positioning itself around emerging standards rather than just its own product, taking part in the FIDO Alliance’s authentication working group and the x402 identity effort alongside Cloudflare, Google, Visa and Mastercard.
Tech Funding News has been tracking this shift across the payments stack. Trustap raised $10 million to become a trust layer for AI shopping agents, while eComID raised $17 million to build a shopping passport for AI commerce. The opportunity also extends beyond payments. Wassist raised $1.1 million to bring AI-powered commerce to WhatsApp, while Jelou raised $10 million to turn WhatsApp conversations into transactional AI hubs.
The open question isn’t whether agents will start transacting at scale — that’s already happening. It’s who gets to be the layer everyone else trusts to vouch for them, and whether that job ends up split across a dozen competing “trust layers” or consolidates around one or two.
Baselayer envisions its existing bank relationships coming first.
