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Baselayer Raises $35M to Build Identity Trust Layer for AI Agents

Business identity startup Baselayer has raised $35 million in early-stage funding and launched an Agentic Identity Suite to verify AI agents that transact on behalf of businesses.

AI News Feed · 2026-09-22 23:26

The Series A round was led by M13, with participation from Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital and others. The company said the funding will support its work on identity verification for automated software that opens accounts, pays invoices and moves money.

Baselayer was founded in 2024 by Chief Executive Jonathan Awad, a risk management specialist, and Chief Technology Officer Timothy Hyde. It originally built business identity verification tools that it says are now used by more than 2,300 financial institutions, including one in five U.S. banks. Those tools have reviewed more than 10 million applications and prevented over $1 billion in fraudulent transactions, according to the company.

The new suite is built around what Baselayer calls "Know Your Agent." It is designed to let financial institutions cryptographically trace an AI agent's actions back to the platform that deployed it and the business that authorized it, producing an auditable chain of liability without relying on passwords. The company has also developed a Model Context Protocol server and an Agentic Search tool that ground AI models in verified business data drawn from sources including the Inland Revenue and the Secretary of State, and a Counterparty Verification feature that lets agents check the legitimacy of the businesses they deal with.

Awad said each new era of commerce has required a new trust layer, and that such infrastructure historically gets built only after fraud makes the problem impossible to ignore. "Agentic commerce is moving too fast for the industry to repeat that mistake," he said. "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 push comes as AI models take on a larger role in payments. Stripe Inc. said in June that more than 70% of the requests to its application programming interface came from AI agents. Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc., American Express Co. and Shopify Inc. have all deployed protocols this year to support agentic commerce, according to SiliconANGLE.

Those providers still rely on financial rails designed to identify humans and traditional businesses rather than autonomous software, leaving banks and merchants unable to determine who an agent is, who it represents or whether it can be trusted. Baselayer says its existing business identity infrastructure can be adapted to that gap.

The company is also working on standards for the emerging market, taking part in the FIDO Alliance Authentication Working Group, the Legal Context Protocol and the x402 Identity Working Group alongside Google LLC, Cloudflare Inc., Visa and Mastercard.

M13 Managing Partner Karl Alomar said AI agents have emerged quickly as major actors in the economy even though the identity infrastructure around them was never built for software that opens accounts, buys goods and services and moves money. "This creates an enormous new trust problem, and we believe identity will become one of the foundational infrastructure layers of the agentic economy," he said.

Editor's Summary

Baselayer, legally Osiris Ratings Inc., has raised $35 million in a Series A round led by M13 and launched an Agentic Identity Suite intended to verify AI agents acting for businesses. The company is extending identity tools already used by more than 2,300 financial institutions into agentic commerce, where payments firms report rapid growth in agent-initiated transactions. It is also participating in industry working groups shaping identity standards for that market.