Baselayer Builds Identity Infrastructure for AI Agents

Baselayer is building identity and risk infrastructure for a market that now includes businesses, consumers, and autonomous software. The company combines business verification, credit data, fraud intelligence, and network signals so financial institutions and software platforms can decide who they are dealing with before an account opens or value moves.

Co-founders Jonathan Awad, CEO, and Timothy Hyde, CTO, started Baselayer in February 2023. The company now says its technology supports more than 2,300 financial institutions and is expanding from know-your-business decisions into identity and authorization for AI agents. That transition matters because software can act faster than the systems used to establish who authorized it.

About Baselayer

Baselayer began with the blind spots inside business onboarding. Traditional KYB checks can pull from static registries, but fraud rarely waits for a clean database update. A lender or bank may also need to understand ownership, digital presence, legal exposure, credit signals, application velocity, and patterns observed elsewhere in the financial system.

Baselayer brings those inputs into one identity and risk platform. Its product set covers business verification, KYB ratings, industry prediction, consumer screening, credit and legal records, portfolio monitoring, fraud intelligence, and automated risk analysis. Customers can use a web console, an API, or integrations embedded inside other financial software.

The company sells to banks, credit unions, fintech companies, payments providers, marketplaces, and small-business lenders. Baselayer's partner network includes decisioning and identity companies such as Taktile, Socure, Oscilar, Alloy, Prove, and Footprint. Those connections matter because risk infrastructure often reaches the end user through another platform rather than a standalone screen.

The Network Behind Baselayer's Product

Baselayer's durable bet is that business identity improves when institutions can learn from shared activity rather than checking one application in isolation. The Baselayer Identity Network combines public records, proprietary information, partner data, and patterns observed across participating institutions. Its Fraud Consortium is designed to expose repeat and coordinated behavior that a single lender might miss.

The scale figures are company-reported. Baselayer says more than 2,300 financial institutions use its technology, the network processes tens of millions of applications, and customers have prevented more than $1B in fraud losses. The current financing account also says Baselayer reached eight-figure revenue in under two years.

Official customer examples show where the network can change an operating metric. LoanPro says its embedded implementation reduced manual KYB reviews by more than 60%. Nuvei reported materially higher match rates than its prior provider. FIS describes Baselayer as part of the identity infrastructure supporting hundreds of financial institutions and millions of small businesses.

Why Baselayer Is Moving Into Agent Identity

Autonomous agents create a related identity problem. An agent can research, negotiate, buy, and move money, but a counterparty still needs to know which person or business stands behind it and what that agent is permitted to do. A login credential proves access. It does not necessarily prove a current mandate.

Baselayer's Know Your Agent product is designed to attach a portable identity and authorization record to an agent. Counterparty Verification evaluates the business on the other side before an order, payout, or transaction takes place. A trusted registry is intended to help participants discover verified businesses and authorized agents.

The company also offers a Model Context Protocol server that gives AI systems access to verified business context. Through a partnership with Nevermined, agent builders can combine delegated spending authority with identity and risk evidence. The product direction connects Baselayer's original market to a new one without pretending the old work disappears.

Leadership, Funding, and Market Timing

Jonathan Awad and Timothy Hyde lead Baselayer from complementary operating roles. Awad is the CEO and public voice for the market and company strategy. Hyde is the CTO responsible for the underlying technical platform. The current financing report describes a team of about 50 people across San Francisco and New York City.

In September 2026, Baselayer raised a $35M Series A led by M13, with Picus Capital, Torch Capital, Afore Capital, and Matt Thompson of Socure participating. Awad told Crunchbase News the round brought total funding to about $40M. The company did not disclose its valuation.

The timing is important. Agent builders are moving from assistants that recommend an action to software that executes one. Payment networks, identity providers, cloud platforms, and open protocols are all competing to define how that authority travels. Baselayer enters with a live financial-institution network, but there is no settled agent-identity standard and enterprise partnership cycles can take more than a year.

Culture and the Hiring Signal

Baselayer's About page describes a culture built around original thinking grounded in real outcomes, deliberate speed, ambition without ego, ideas over titles, and collaborative debate. The company lists healthcare, unlimited PTO, a 401(k) match, and competitive compensation among its benefits.

The same official page invites candidates to join the team, although its live jobs filter showed no openings during this review. That makes the honest signal broader than a list of roles: Baselayer has fresh capital, a growing product surface, and two offices, but prospective candidates should check the live page rather than rely on a static hiring claim.

For operators, the more important culture test will be whether the company can maintain careful risk judgment while shipping at agent speed. Identity infrastructure fails loudly when the underlying evidence, authority, or policy is wrong. Baselayer's stated preference for pace with purpose is useful only if it survives the pressure to become a standard.

What Baselayer Signals for Fintech

Baselayer sits at the collision point between two changes. Financial services are replacing fragmented manual verification with networked risk intelligence, while AI systems are graduating from analysis to action. Both shifts create demand for evidence that can travel with a decision.

The company has an advantage because it already operates where businesses are verified and transactions are approved. The challenge is distribution across independent agent developers and counterparties. A useful identity credential must be recognized outside the system that issued it, specific enough to limit authority, and simple enough for platforms to adopt.

Baselayer is not merely adding AI language to a KYB product. It is testing whether the base layer for business trust can extend to software acting for that business. The 2,300-institution network gives the company a serious starting point. The next phase will show whether identity, authorization, and counterparty risk can become one interoperable decision rather than three more disconnected checks.