Baselayer, a San Francisco startup that provides identity verification and fraud risk infrastructure to financial institutions, has raised a $35 million Series A round led by M13, the company announced on 22 September Crunchbase reported.
Key points
- Series A of $35 million led by M13 with participation from Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital and Socure executive Matt Thompson
- Total funding reaches about $40 million since the company’s 2024 founding
- Agentic Identity Suite launched to verify autonomous AI agents that transact on behalf of businesses and consumers
- Network covers more than 2,300 financial institutions and payments companies, representing over 20% of U.S. institutions
- Company claims its platform has helped customers prevent more than $1 billion in fraud losses
Financing and investors
The round brings Baselayer’s total capital raised to approximately $40 million since the company was founded in 2024. M13 Managing Partner Karl Alomar said the firm was drawn to Baselayer’s existing distribution across more than 2,300 financial institutions and the deep risk data that network generates, which differentiates it from startups attempting to build AI identity infrastructure from scratch. M13 oversees roughly $2.2 billion and counts 18 portfolio companies from early funding rounds that have since achieved unicorn valuations. Baselayer declined to disclose its valuation in the Series A.
Agentic Identity Suite
Alongside the financing, Baselayer launched its Agentic Identity Suite, extending its identity network from businesses to the AI agents that act on their behalf. The suite aims to let financial institutions, payment firms and other businesses establish the identity behind an AI agent, confirm it has permission to operate, and gauge the reliability of any exchange. The company describes the problem as a new identity layer for financial services: existing verification infrastructure focuses on individuals and businesses, but autonomous agents introduce a participant that carries no conventional credentials and leaves little or no history for risk systems to evaluate.
“Agents spin up and they spin down,” chief executive Jonathan Awad said. “How can you trust this random one-task agent?” The suite aims to provide authorized agents with a credential they can present cryptographically, while also assessing transaction risk. Baselayer presents the platform as open infrastructure that works across networks, not a proprietary identity framework locked to one payment rail or AI ecosystem.
Market context and partnerships
The launch responds to rapid adoption of AI agents across digital commerce. Stripe reported that 70% of commands used to access data through its API came from AI agents as of June 2026. Visa, Mastercard and American Express have introduced agent-commerce protocols, and Shopify has enabled agentic sales channels for roughly one million merchants. Baselayer collaborates with builders of autonomous agents, payment networks, financial institutions and payments firms such as FIS, Prove, Socure, Exa, Parallel Web Systems, Natural, Nevermined and Lane while advancing its agentic identity and risk offerings.
The company is also participating in standards efforts for agent-based transactions, including the FIDO Alliance Authentication Working Group, the Legal Context Protocol and the x402 Identity Working Group alongside Cloudflare, Google, Visa and Mastercard. Those relationships could become an important part of Baselayer’s market position, since identity infrastructure becomes more useful when credentials and trust signals operate across multiple institutions, merchants, payment networks and agent platforms.
Existing business and revenue
The company’s platform merges business identity, credit and fraud data so that lenders, technology-focused financial firms and other intermediaries can vet new customers. It sells directly and through software companies that resell or white-label its technology. The automated platform initially focused on Know Your Business (KYB) identity verification, fraud detection and risk management. Awad said the company processes tens of millions of applications and recognizes many of the same businesses applying across multiple institutions, which feeds its risk scoring.
Awad said Baselayer reached eight-figure revenue in less than two years but declined to disclose hard figures. The company employs about 50 people across offices in San Francisco and New York and also works with Fortune 500 companies.
