M13 Leads Baselayer’s $35M Series A for AI Agent Identity
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Baselayer has raised a $35 million Series A led by M13. Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital and Matt Thompson of Socure also joined the round.
The company is based in New York. Its identity verification and risk infrastructure is already used by one in five financial institutions in the country. Alongside the funding, Baselayer launched its Agentic Identity Suite, which it bills as the first interoperable trust layer and agentic fraud consortium for the agentic economy.
The timing reflects how quickly AI agents are showing up in payments. In June, Stripe reported that 70% of the commands used to access data through its API now come from AI agents. Over the past year, Visa, Mastercard and American Express have each shipped agent commerce protocols, and Shopify switched on agentic sales channels by default for roughly one million merchants.
Financial infrastructure was built to recognize people and businesses, not software acting on their behalf. Before a bank, merchant or platform lets an agent transact, it needs to know who that agent represents, whether it is authorized to act, and whether the party on the other side can be trusted. The new suite is meant to answer those questions.
Baselayer already does the equivalent work for businesses. Its platform serves more than 2,300 financial institutions and payments companies and has helped customers prevent more than $1 billion in fraud losses. Machine learning specialist Timothy Hyde, now CTO, and risk management veteran Jonathan Awad, now CEO, founded the company in 2024.
Baselayer works with agent builders, card networks, financial institutions and payments companies, including FIS, Prove, Socure, Exa, Parallel Web Systems, Natural, Nevermined and Lane. It is also involved in setting standards for the agentic economy through the FIDO Alliance Authentication Working Group, Legal Context Protocol and the x402 Identity Working Group, alongside Cloudflare, Google, Visa and Mastercard.
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