Baselayer Secures $35 Million Series A to Verify AI Agents for Financial Services

Baselayer, an AI-driven risk-management firm, announced a $35 million Series A round aimed at extending its identity-verification technology to artificial-intelligence agents. The financing was led by venture firm M13, with participation from Picus Capital, Torch Capital, Afore Capital and Matt Thompson of Socure. The capital brings the company’s total backing to roughly $40 million since its launch in early 2023, though the firm chose not to disclose a valuation.

Founded by Jonathan Awad and Timothy Hyde in February 2023, Baselayer originally tackled the cumbersome process banks use to confirm the legitimacy of business customers. Its platform aggregates business identity, credit and fraud data, delivering automated “Know Your Business” checks that help institutions onboard merchants, underwrite credit and open accounts. According to Awad, more than 2,000 financial institutions, representing over one-fifth of U.S. banks, already rely on the service, and the company also serves a number of Fortune 500 firms. With a staff of about 50 spread across San Francisco and New York, Baselayer claims its technology has prevented more than $1 billion in fraudulent losses and generated eight-figure revenue in under two years.

The new round will fund the launch of the Agentic Identity Suite, a set of tools designed to answer a growing question: how can a financial institution be sure that an AI agent acting on its platform is authorized to do so? As consumers increasingly employ bots to make reservations, place orders or initiate payments, the line between legitimate automation and malicious scraping blurs. Baselayer’s “Know Your Agent” (KYA) framework seeks to attach verifiable credentials to each agent, indicating who created it, which entity it represents and what tasks it is permitted to perform. When presented with such a credential, a merchant, bank or online service could decide whether to allow the transaction to proceed.

To build this ecosystem, Baselayer is partnering with payment processors, fraud-detection vendors and agent developers, including FIS, Prove and Socure. The company envisions a credential that agents present at the point of purchase, enabling downstream parties to validate the agent’s authenticity in real time. Without such a mechanism, Awad warns that agents could be blocked across the board, limiting their usefulness, while fraudsters could exploit the same speed and scale that AI agents provide to automate identity theft.

M13 managing partner Karl Alomar, who met Awad a year before the investment, noted that his view of Baselayer shifted as the market began to explore payments made by AI agents. He believes the startup’s existing data network and relationships with banks give it a competitive edge over newcomers. “Every agent ultimately will need to be tied to something real,” Alomar said, adding that the current identity infrastructure was never built for software that can open accounts or move money on behalf of others.

The move positions Baselayer at the intersection of fintech risk management and emerging AI commerce. As autonomous agents become routine participants in digital transactions, the need for a trusted identity layer is likely to intensify. Whether Baselayer’s credential system will become an industry standard remains to be seen, but its early traction among thousands of institutions suggests that the problem it aims to solve is already pressing for founders, operators and investors alike.