An AI agent can have a wallet, a mandate, and enough autonomy to act before the merchant knows whose money it is spending.
That gap between capability and accountability is the job behind Baselayer $35M Series A.
M13 led the round, with Picus Capital, Torch Capital, Afore Capital, and Matthew Thompson of Socure participating. CEO Jonathan Awad told Crunchbase News the financing brings Baselayer's total funding to about $40M. The valuation was not disclosed.
Jonathan Awad and CTO Timothy Hyde started Baselayer in 2023 with a familiar identity problem. Banks and fintechs needed to determine whether a business was real, who stood behind it, and what risk arrived with its application before opening an account or moving money.
Baselayer built that judgment into an identity network and fraud consortium spanning registrations, public records, digital signals, legal and credit data, and activity across financial institutions. It sells directly and through software partners.
The company says more than 2,000 financial institutions use its technology, its network processes tens of millions of applications, and customers have prevented more than $1B in fraud losses. Those figures are company-reported, not audited. They still explain why M13 sees more than another KYB vendor.
Baselayer is using the round to launch its Agentic Identity Suite. Know Your Agent connects software to the verified person or business it represents and the authority it was given. Counterparty Verification checks the other side; its MCP supplies business context.
The credential is the interesting part. An authorized agent could present only the identity and risk evidence a transaction requires, without carrying a reusable password through every interaction. A merchant, processor, platform, or bank could then decide whether to allow, challenge, monitor, or block the action.
That is a harder distribution problem than shipping another API. Agent builders must issue the credential. Counterparties must recognize it. Payment and fraud providers must connect it to their decisions. Baselayer is already working across that handoff with companies including FIS, Prove, Socure, and Nevermined, but no dominant agent-identity standard exists yet.
The capital gives Baselayer room to turn an existing business-identity network into infrastructure for delegated action. The next proof will arrive one accepted transaction at a time, when an agent can show who sent it, what it may do, and who remains accountable after the task disappears.
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