Baselayer, a company specializing in corporate identity verification and fraud-risk assessment for financial institutions, has raised $35 million in a Series A funding round led by M13, with participation from Picus Capital, Torch Capital, Afore Capital, and Matt Thompson of Socure. The round brings the company’s total funding since its founding in 2023 to approximately $40 million, while Baselayer has not disclosed its valuation.
The San Francisco-based company plans to use the funding to expand its technology toward AI agents, alongside the launch of the Agentic Identity Suite. The new platform focuses on a question different from traditional corporate verification: Does the agent attempting to make a purchase or interact with a service actually represent an individual or organization, and does it have permission to carry out the specific task?
From Corporate Verification to Agent Verification
Baselayer began operations in February 2023, focusing on Know Your Business (KYB), fraud detection, and risk management. The platform combines corporate identity, credit, and fraud data to help banks, fintech companies, and financial-services providers assess prospective customers when onboarding merchants, conducting underwriting, or opening accounts.
According to co-founder and CEO Jonathan Awad, more than 2,000 financial institutions use Baselayer’s technology, representing more than 20% of financial institutions in the United States, and the company also works with companies on the Fortune 500 list. Baselayer says its technology has helped customers prevent more than $1 billion in fraud losses, and that its revenue reached a double-digit million figure in less than two years, without publishing detailed revenue figures.
How Does Agent Identity Work?
Baselayer is developing a system it calls Know Your Agent (KYA). The stated idea is to issue credentials to an authorized agent so that it can present them when attempting to make a purchase or interact with a merchant, financial institution, or online platform. The other party can use this information to determine the identity of the entity that deployed the agent, the entity it represents, and whether it is authorized to carry out the action.
The company is working with agent developers, payment processors, merchants, and fraud-detection technology providers to issue and recognize the credentials. The entities mentioned include FIS, Prove, and Socure.
Why Does This Development Matter?
Agents capable of booking services or making payments may become economic parties that execute transactions on behalf of users, while the current identity and commerce infrastructure was designed primarily to handle people and companies. The absence of a reliable way to prove authorization could lead platforms to block agents as bots, or allow fraudsters to run automated operations at greater scale and speed.
Baselayer acknowledges that its system does not prevent an AI model from ignoring instructions or exploiting a vulnerability; its stated goal is to verify an agent’s credentials when it interacts with an external party. The company also notes that AI-enabled fraud can operate continuously and around the clock, increasing the need for a verification layer before transactions are permitted.
A Standard That Has Not Yet Taken Hold
There is currently no dominant standard for AI-agent identity, so Baselayer must persuade agent developers, merchants, financial institutions, and payment companies to accept its credentials. Awad says that building relationships with financial institutions typically takes between 12 and 18 months, while partnerships with large merchants can take up to 24 months, despite the possibility of accelerating access through existing reseller channels.
Editorial reading: The actual change here is not merely the launch of a new product, but an attempt to transfer expertise in verifying corporate identities to software that acts on their behalf. The idea’s success will depend on multiple parties adopting the same credentials, and on its ability to prove authorization without becoming a comprehensive guarantee of an agent’s behavior or a substitute for other security controls. The company proposes future uses in cryptocurrency transactions and smart contracts, but the source does not yet establish the existence of a market standard or broad commercial adoption for these applications.