Baselayer Secures $35M Series A to Launch Industry-First Identity Layer for AI Agents

Baselayer has secured $35 million in Series A funding to address the growing security gap in agentic commerce. As autonomous AI agents increasingly handle financial transactions, the firm is deploying a dedicated identity layer to help 2,300 financial institutions verify whether software actors are authorized to move money on behalf of human users.

What was announced

The $35 million Series A round was led by M13, with participation from Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital, and Matt Thompson at Socure. The investment coincides with the launch of the Agentic Identity Suite, which Baselayer describes as the industry’s first interoperable trust layer and agentic fraud consortium. The suite is designed to provide cryptographic verification for the "agentic economy," where autonomous software increasingly acts as an economic participant.

The necessity for this infrastructure is driven by a rapid shift in digital traffic. Stripe recently reported that 70% of the commands used to access data through its API now originate from AI agents. Furthermore, major networks including Visa, Mastercard, and American Express have shipped agent commerce protocols, while Shopify has enabled agentic sales channels for approximately one million merchants. Baselayer’s platform provides the identity verification and risk infrastructure required to determine who an agent represents and whether it is authorized to act.

Founded in 2024, Baselayer already serves one in five U.S. financial institutions and has reportedly helped customers prevent more than $1 billion in fraud losses. The company is working with a broad range of partners to integrate these solutions, including FIS, Prove, Socure, Exa, Parallel Web Systems, Natural, Nevermined, and Lane. Beyond product development, the firm is involved in establishing industry standards through the FIDO Alliance Authentication Working Group, the Legal Context Protocol, and the x402 Identity Working Group alongside participants like Cloudflare, Google, Visa, and Mastercard.

"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. 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?'"

Jonathan Awad, co-founder and CEO of Baselayer.

The companies involved

Baselayer, which operates via baselayerhq.com, was established in 2024 by machine learning pioneer Timothy Hyde and risk management veteran Jonathan Awad. The company has quickly positioned itself as a critical infrastructure provider for identity and risk, currently trusted by 2,300 financial institutions and payments companies. Lead investor M13 is an early-stage venture capital firm managing $2.2 billion in assets. M13 has a history of backing significant fintech and enterprise players, with 18 of its seed or Series A investments later reaching unicorn status.

The funding round also saw participation from Socure, a leading provider of predictive identity verification and fraud platform services. Matt Thompson, who participated in the round, serves as President & Chief Commercial Officer at Socure. Other investors include Torch Capital, a firm focused on consumer and enterprise technology, and Picus Ventures. This group of investors represents a cross-section of the identity and venture capital landscape, focusing on the transition from human-centric to software-centric financial interactions. Baselayer’s founders bring a combination of technical machine learning expertise and traditional risk management experience to the challenge of autonomous transaction security.

What FF News has reported before

FF News has closely followed the evolution of identity verification and the rise of AI in the banking sector. We recently covered how Socure launches Remote Verifier to eliminate identity friction and boost public sector inclusion, reflecting the industry's push for more robust digital onboarding. Additionally, our reporting on Socure and Aeropay launch two-click bank linking and identity verification integration highlighted the trend toward reducing friction in payments. The broader shift toward automation was also noted in our report on how RDC.AI expands North American footprint with agentic AI for commercial banking, which mirrors the market demand Baselayer is now addressing.

What this means

The shift from human-initiated to agent-initiated commerce represents a fundamental challenge to traditional KYC and AML protocols. Most existing financial infrastructure is binary, designed to verify either a person or a legal entity, but it lacks the mechanisms to handle a delegated "agent" that may have limited or temporary authority. Baselayer is moving to capture this middle ground before legacy fraud systems are overwhelmed by the volume of automated API calls. If 70% of traffic is already non-human, the industry is under immediate pressure to adopt interoperable standards. The real test for the sector will be whether these cryptographic trust layers can achieve universal adoption across competing card networks without creating new silos of identity data.