Crunchbase News reports that Baselayer, a San Francisco startup that helps financial institutions verify businesses and assess fraud risk, has raised a $35 million Series A led by M13, with participation from Picus Capital, Torch Capital, Afore Capital and Matt Thompson of Socure. The round brings total funding to about $40 million since the company's 2023 founding, according to co-founder and CEO Jonathan Awad.
Baselayer's existing platform focuses on Know Your Business (KYB) verification, fraud detection and risk management. More than 2,000 financial institutions — over 20% of such institutions in the U.S. — use the technology, and the company says it has helped customers prevent more than $1 billion in fraud losses. Baselayer has about 50 employees across San Francisco and New York and says it reached eight-figure revenue in under two years.
Alongside the raise, Baselayer launched its Agentic Identity Suite, extending its identity network from businesses to the AI agents transacting on their behalf. The centerpiece is a system the company calls Know Your Agent (KYA), designed to determine who deployed an agent, who that agent represents, and whether it has permission to carry out a specific task. The mechanism works by issuing an authorized agent a credential it can present when attempting a purchase or interaction; a merchant, bank or platform can then use that credential to decide whether to allow the transaction.
Awad framed the problem as one of disposability: agents are often created for a single task and disappear immediately after, leaving little history for a risk provider to evaluate. "Agents spin up and they spin down," he said. Without a way to prove legitimacy, he argued, agents will either be blocked outright or resort to workarounds just to complete assigned tasks.
Baselayer is working with agent developers, payment processors, merchants and fraud-detection providers — including FIS, Prove and Socure — to issue and recognize its credential. Awad said relationships with financial institutions typically take 12 to 18 months to establish, and large merchant partnerships can take up to 24 months, though existing reseller relationships may speed things up.
M13 managing partner Karl Alomar said his view of the company shifted as AI-agent payments emerged as a category: "Every agent ultimately is going to have to be tied to something real." He said identity infrastructure for commerce was never built for software that opens accounts, moves money or enters transactions on someone else's behalf, and expects identity to become foundational infrastructure for what he calls the agentic economy.
The company acknowledges its technology does not stop a model from disregarding instructions or exploiting a vulnerability — it verifies credentials at the point of external transaction, not model behavior itself. No dominant industry standard for agent credentials currently exists.