Baselayer, the identity and risk infrastructure provider used by one in five US financial institutions, has closed a $35m Series A round and unveiled a product suite designed to verify and govern the AI agents now transacting on behalf of people and businesses.
M13 led the investment, joined by Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital and Socure’s Matt Thompson. Together with the funding, the firm introduced its Agentic Identity Suite, which it describes as the first interoperable trust layer and agentic fraud consortium built for the worldwide agent economy.
The raise comes as autonomous software rapidly takes on a larger share of commercial activity. Stripe disclosed in June that AI agents now generate 70% of the commands used to pull data through its API.
During the last twelve months, Visa, Mastercard and American Express have each released protocols for agent-driven commerce, while Shopify enabled agentic sales channels automatically for around one million merchants. This shift leaves banks, merchants and platforms, whose systems were designed to identify humans and companies, needing fresh ways to confirm which party an agent serves, whether it holds permission to act, and whether the counterparty can be trusted.
Baselayer currently supplies identity verification and risk tooling to more than 2,300 financial institutions and payments firms, and says its clients have avoided over $1bn in fraud losses using the platform.
Timothy Hyde, a machine learning specialist, and Jonathan Awad, who brings a background in risk management, launched the business in 2024. The pair are now applying their existing business verification infrastructure to autonomous agents.
To serve rising enterprise appetite, Baselayer collaborates with agent developers, card networks, financial institutions and payments players such as FIS, Prove, Socure, Exa, Parallel Web Systems, Natural, Nevermined and Lane.
The company also contributes to shaping standards for the sector, taking part in the FIDO Alliance Authentication Working Group, the Legal Context Protocol and the x402 Identity Working Group, alongside organisations including Cloudflare, Google, Visa and Mastercard.
Baselayer co-founder and CEO Jonathan Awad said, “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?'”
Baselayer co-founder and CTO Timothy Hyde added, “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.”
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