Baselayer Raises $35M for Agent Identity Infrastructure

An AI agent can now search, negotiate, book, and pay with less human supervision than many identity systems were designed to handle. The missing layer is not another reasoning model. It is a reliable way for the other side of a transaction to know who sent the agent, what authority it has, and who remains accountable.

Baselayer is financing its attempt to build that layer. The San Francisco-based identity and risk infrastructure company 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 company plans to use the round to expand the business-identity network it already sells to financial institutions into an Agentic Identity Suite for autonomous software.

What Baselayer Raised and Who Invested

The Series A brings Baselayer's total funding to about $40 million since its 2023 founding, CEO Jonathan Awad told Crunchbase News. The company did not disclose its valuation. Earlier reporting on a smaller financing was superseded by the direct, current account of the $35 million round.

M13 led the financing. Picus Capital, Torch Capital, Afore Capital, and Socure's Matt Thompson joined the round. M13 partner Karl Alomar framed the investment around the idea that agentic commerce needs an independent trust layer: infrastructure that can connect software actions to a verified principal and a defined scope of authority.

That thesis puts the financing in a different category from a routine expansion round for a know-your-business vendor. Baselayer is betting that the identity graph, risk signals, and financial-institution relationships built for business onboarding can become a foundation for delegated software activity.

From Business Verification to Agent Identity

Awad and CTO Timothy Hyde founded Baselayer in February 2023. The original product addressed a familiar problem for banks and fintech companies: deciding whether a business is real, who controls it, and what risk accompanies an application before an account is opened or money moves.

Baselayer combines business registrations, public records, digital signals, legal and credit data, and observed activity across financial institutions. It sells that intelligence directly and through software partners. The company says its technology is used by more than 2,000 financial institutions, processes tens of millions of applications, and has helped customers prevent more than $1 billion in fraud losses. Those figures are company-reported rather than independently audited, but they show the operating base behind the new product direction.

The company also says it reached eight-figure revenue in less than two years and now employs about 50 people across San Francisco and New York City. The new capital is intended to support product development and distribution as Baselayer moves from verifying organizations at onboarding to verifying software that acts on their behalf.

How Know Your Agent Is Supposed to Work

The core of Baselayer's Agentic Identity Suite is Know Your Agent, or KYA. The credential is designed to bind an agent to a verified person or business, identify the developer or deployer behind it, and express the authority granted for a particular task.

That changes the question a counterparty can ask. Instead of trusting a reusable password or treating every automated action as if a human clicked the button, a merchant, processor, platform, or bank could evaluate whether the agent is acting for a verified principal and whether the attempted action fits its mandate. Baselayer says a transaction can disclose only the identity and risk evidence required for that decision.

The surrounding suite includes Counterparty Verification for evaluating the other side of a transaction. Baselayer has also introduced a Model Context Protocol server that can supply business identity and risk context to agent systems. Its partnership with Nevermined connects identity and authorization with payments infrastructure for agentic commerce.

Together, those pieces are meant to answer three separate questions: who is behind the agent, what the agent may do, and whether the counterparty is safe enough for the transaction to proceed. Keeping those decisions separate matters because identity alone does not prove authority, and authority alone does not make a counterparty trustworthy.

Why the Hard Part Is Coordination

The technical credential is only one part of the market. For KYA to matter, agent developers must issue or attach the identity evidence, and the services receiving those agents must recognize and enforce it. Payment processors, fraud platforms, merchants, software vendors, and financial institutions all need a reason to participate.

Baselayer enters that coordination problem with existing financial-institution distribution and integrations with companies including FIS, Prove, and Socure. That can shorten the distance between a new identity primitive and a live risk decision. It does not eliminate the adoption challenge. Awad said partnership cycles can run 12 to 18 months with financial institutions and as long as 24 months with some merchants.

There is also no dominant identity standard for autonomous agents. Competing approaches can emerge from payment networks, cloud platforms, identity providers, and open protocols. Baselayer will have to make its credential useful across systems without turning it into another closed identifier that counterparties must integrate one by one.

What the Series A Has to Prove

The financing gives Baselayer time to test whether its business-identity network can become infrastructure for delegated action. The strongest advantage is practical: the company already sits close to onboarding, fraud, and payment decisions where agent credentials would have to be evaluated.

The proof will not be a demo in which one agent presents a credential to one friendly service. It will be repeated acceptance across independent counterparties, with policies that can allow, challenge, monitor, or block an action based on verified authority. That requires a credential model that is useful to developers, legible to risk teams, and specific enough to limit what an agent can do.

If Baselayer can coordinate those participants, the company could move from telling a bank that a business exists to telling an entire transaction network why a piece of software is allowed to act for it. The $35 million Series A funds that transition. The market will decide whether Know Your Agent becomes a shared trust layer or another integration waiting for a standard.