Baselayer, an identity and risk infrastructure company, has raised $35 million in Series A funding led by M13. The round included participation from Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital and Matt Thompson of Socure.
Alongside the funding, Baselayer launched its Agentic Identity Suite, a platform designed to help financial institutions and businesses verify and manage AI agents that can act on behalf of people and companies.
As AI agents become more involved in online transactions, businesses need to know who an agent represents, whether it has permission to act and whether the other party involved in a transaction can be trusted.
Baselayer already provides identity verification and risk technology to more than 2,300 financial institutions and payments companies. The company says its platform has helped customers prevent more than $1 billion in fraud losses.
“Agents don’t carry ID, and the infrastructure built to verify humans and businesses simply doesn’t recognize them,” said Timothy Hyde, co-founder and CTO of Baselayer. “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.”
“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,” said Karl Alomar, Managing Partner at early stage venture capital firm M13. “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.”
The new Agentic Identity Suite extends Baselayer’s existing identity and risk infrastructure to autonomous AI agents. The company is working with agent developers, card networks, financial institutions and payment companies to develop identity and fraud solutions for AI-driven transactions.
Baselayer is also involved in efforts to develop standards for the growing agentic economy, including work with the FIDO Alliance Authentication Working Group, Legal Context Protocol and x402 Identity Working Group.
“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,” said Jonathan Awad, co-founder and CEO of Baselayer. “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 was founded in 2024 by Timothy Hyde, a machine learning specialist, and Jonathan Awad, a risk management professional.
The company will use the new funding to expand its identity and risk technology as AI agents become more widely used in financial services, payments and commerce.
