Baselayer Raises $35M Series A Led by M13, Launches Identity Infrastructure for AI Agents
Already used by more than 1 in 5 financial institutions to verify businesses and manage risk, Baselayer is extending its identity network to agents acting and transacting on their behalf
NEW YORK, Sept. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Baselayer, the identity and risk infrastructure company trusted by 1 in 5 financial institutions nationwide, today announced it 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 round, the company launched its Agentic Identity Suite, bringing the industry's first interoperable trust layer and agentic fraud consortium to the global agentic economy.
The problem Baselayer solves
Agentic commerce is arriving faster than the trust infrastructure required to ensure it can safely flourish. In June, Stripe reported that 70% of the commands used to access data through its API now come from AI agents. Over the past year, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express have all shipped agent commerce protocols, and Shopify turned on agentic sales channels by default for roughly one million merchants.
That creates a new identity problem for financial infrastructure built to recognize people and businesses, not autonomous software acting on their behalf. Before a bank, merchant, or platform lets an agent transact, it has to know: who does this agent represent, is it authorized to act, and can it trust the party on the other side.
Baselayer already answers the equivalent questions for businesses. Its platform provides identity verification and risk infrastructure to 2,300+ financial institutions and payments companies, and has helped customers prevent more than $1 billion in fraud losses. Founded in 2024 by machine learning pioneer Timothy Hyde and risk management veteran Jonathan Awad, the company is now extending that same infrastructure to autonomous agents.
"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?'"
The Agentic Identity Suite
Baselayer works with agent builders, card networks, and leading FIs and payments companies including FIS, Prove, Socure, Exa, Parallel Web Systems, Natural, Nevermined, Lane, and more, to offer agentic identity and risk solutions to meet accelerating enterprise demand.
Beyond the products they develop, Baselayer is helping to establish and promote the industry standards the agentic economy will run on, including the FIDO Alliance Authentication Working Group, Legal Context Protocol, and the x402 Identity Working Group alongside companies like Cloudflare, Google, Visa, and Mastercard.
"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."
M13 manages $2.2 billion in assets and has backed 18 companies at seed or Series A that later reached unicorn status.
About Baselayer
Baselayer is the leading risk and identity infrastructure platform for 2,300+ financial institutions, Fortune 500s, and government agencies as they onboard and underwrite businesses, consumers, and the agents they deploy. Learn more at baselayer.com.
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Jonathan Awad
Co-Founder & CEO, Baselayer
SOURCE Baselayer
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