Baselayer Raises $35M to Build AI Agent Trust
Baselayer raised $35M Series A led by M13 to build identity verification and trust infrastructure for AI agents transacting in finance.
The big picture: Baselayer, a New York identity and risk infrastructure company, has raised $35 million in a Series A round to build identity checks that verify AI agents before they can transact. The company already helps over 2,300 financial institutions verify businesses.
Why it matters:
- Untracked Transactions: AI agents are increasingly opening accounts, moving money, and buying goods on behalf of businesses, but traditional financial systems lack a standardized way to verify their identity or authority.
- Fraud Prevention: Baselayer’s existing ‘Know Your Business’ tools have helped prevent over $1 billion in fraud losses, and extending this capability to AI agents is critical as agentic commerce scales.
- Market Shift: Major players like Stripe, Shopify, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express are already seeing or enabling agents to handle a significant portion of API requests and sales, indicating a structural shift in commerce.
How it works:
- Extending KYC: Baselayer is adapting its existing ‘Know Your Business’ (KYB) infrastructure, which verifies companies, to cover the AI agents transacting on those businesses’ behalf.
- Agent Identity Graph: The company is building a new layer to answer key questions: ‘Can I trust this agent, who does it represent, and what is it allowed to do?’
- Standardization Efforts: Baselayer is actively participating in emerging industry standards, including the FIDO Alliance’s authentication working group and the x402 identity effort, alongside major tech and finance companies.
The catch: The market for AI agent trust layers is becoming increasingly competitive, with multiple companies like Trustap and eComID also raising significant capital to address similar challenges. The open question is whether the market will consolidate around one or two dominant ‘trust layers’ or remain fragmented across many specialized solutions, potentially leading to interoperability challenges and a slower adoption curve for a universal standard.
Key Facts
- Company: Baselayer
- Amount: $35M
- Round: Series A
- Investors: M13 (lead), Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital, Matt Thompson
- Founders: Jonathan Awad, Timothy Hyde
- Sector: AI Agent Identity Verification
- Headquarters: New York, US