M13

M13 Managing Partner Karl Alomar has been on nearly every side of the startup world — founder, operator, and now investor. He sat down with Tech:NYC to discuss what running companies taught him about investing that he couldn’t have learned in venture, what he’s looking for before there’s consensus, what parts of the AI stack are still underbuilt, and more. https://lnkd.in/eRiRHkEb

What happens when the software spending your money has no identity? Jonathan Awad built Baselayer into an identity network used by one in five U.S. financial institutions, helping prevent more than $1 billion in fraud. Now he’s extending that infrastructure to AI agents. On The Flywheel, M13 Managing Partner Karl Alomar sits down with Jonathan as Baselayer announces its $35M Series A, led by M13. They get into why trust is still expensive, why Meta paying for your ad before you pay Meta is effectively credit, and why AI is turning unsophisticated fraudsters into much more capable adversaries. As agents move from answering questions to spending money, identity becomes infrastructure. 🎧 Tune in on Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eH3gnQ7d YouTube: https://lnkd.in/ezbNBX9Q Apply Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/e5SbBEfT

What does a cancer vaccine founder have in common with a factory entrepreneur, a five-time founder, the inventor of Ring, the former CEO of Twitter and elite college athletes? Put them in a room with hundreds of University of Michigan students and patterns emerge. Five years ago, Latif Peracha and Roger Ehrenberg started the Venture Summit with the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurship to bring students into conversations with leaders across very different fields. As HF0 founder Dave Fontenot put it at the 2024 Summit: a Silicon Valley tour of duty is essential but the next exceptional founder, idea and capital can come from anywhere. Founders choose venture firms. Institutional investors decide which firms to entrust with their capital. We started with that capital chain: Michigan’s Daniel Feder, CFA, OpenFX founder Prabhakar Reddy and M13 co-founder Carter Reum explored how exceptional people recognize one another before the outcomes make the answer easy. M13 partner Sarah Tomolonius spoke with Serova cofounder Michael E. Bryan about personalized cancer vaccines and moving with startup urgency when the human body, scientific evidence and institutions operate on timelines founders can’t control. Ring founder Jamie Siminoff and M13's W. Christine Choi explored the human behind the founder story: what makes someone unreasonable enough to keep going, how fear becomes fuel, and what happens when that fuel no longer serves you. Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo joined Latif to trade unfiltered stories from some of venture and tech’s most consequential years: the deals they made, the ones they missed, what they got wrong and sports and tech predictions. Brandon Schram of 640 Oxford, NOX METALS founder Zane Hengsperger and Cantos principal Amee Kapadia explored AI’s move into the physical world, how it is changing American manufacturing and the jobs that will emerge around it. Venture has plenty to learn from elite sports. Michigan coaches Kyle Church, Kim Barnes Arico and Mike Boynton Jr., and athletes Trey McKenney and Syla Swords, joined Roger to talk about exceptional performance, building winning teams, and what student athletes need from institutions to thrive. Across very different careers, a few ideas kept resurfacing. Speed matters. Mission sustains people through the hard parts. Exceptional people attract exceptional people. And there is no single archetype for success. Thank you to everyone who has kept building this gathering with us. Excited for next year. Go Blue. Photos: Elijah Bland, EBX Studios

Baselayer verifies businesses for more than 2,300 financial institutions and has helped them stop over $1 billion in fraud losses. With a $35 million Series A led by M13, co-founders Jonathan Awad and Timothy Hyde are extending that trust infrastructure to a new class of economic actor: AI agents transacting on businesses’ behalf. "AI agents are rapidly becoming economic actors, but the identity infrastructure underneath commerce was never designed for software that can open accounts, make purchases, move money, or enter into transactions on someone else's behalf," said M13 Managing Partner Karl Alomar. "What made Baselayer especially compelling is that Jonathan and Timothy are not starting from a whiteboard. They have the distribution and the underlying trust graph to become the system institutions rely on to know not just who they are dealing with, but which agents are authorized to act for them." Dig into Baselayer’s origin story, what makes their approach to identity different, and what the future of identity in agentic commerce might hold at https://lnkd.in/euxMeM7i

OpenFX is reimagining how money moves around the world. Its stablecoin-powered infrastructure enables money to move globally in minutes instead of days. The company’s rapid growth reflects how much demand there is for a better way. M13 was the only new investor to join OpenFX’s Series A, and we’re proud to back Prabhakar Reddy and the team as they build the infrastructure for a faster, more connected global financial system. 🎧 Listen to the full conversation on The Flywheel for more on the $2 trillion problem hiding in global payments, how OpenFX grew more than 20x in a year to roughly $50 billion in volume with about 100 employees, and why stablecoins are becoming the invisible rails under global money movement: https://lnkd.in/ewMBeD2F And if you’re in Ann Arbor today, hear more from Prabhakar, Carter Reum, Latif Peracha, and other investors, founders, and operators at the fifth annual University of Michigan Venture Summit. venturesummita2.co

What if the most overlooked market in tech is the one every investor told you to run from? When Parth Shah raised his first round in 2021, one investor told him they’d back any idea besides local government from an MIT engineer like him. Five years later, Polimorphic is in 30 states, and the “boring” market nobody wanted looks like one of the biggest AI opportunities in the country. “We love an archaic industry that was paper and pen leapfrogging effectively a decade of technology into the future with AI,” M13 partner Latif Peracha says. “At M13, we spend a lot of time looking for structural shifts before they become obvious. AI is creating an opportunity to modernize industries that have historically been overlooked, and we believe government may be one of the biggest opportunities of all, the true sleepiest segment of them all.” Tune into Latif and Parth’s conversation exploring the macro thesis on government, why Polimorphic became North Carolina's de facto AI customer service platform, why the real prize may be bigger than software, and more on The Flywheel: https://lnkd.in/eDW2fgqv And catch Latif this Friday at the 5th annual University of Michigan Venture Summit - along with M13 portco founder Prabhakar Reddy (OpenFX) and M13’s Carter Reum, W. Christine Choi, and Sarah Tomolonius. GO BLUE!venturesummita2.co

M13 is going midwest this Friday for the 5th annual Venture Summit at University of Michigan! Join us + a lineup of other investors, founders, operators, and leaders in Ann Arbor for an afternoon of candid conversations on what it takes to build, scale, and fund enduring companies. You’ll hear from Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures), Dick Costolo (01 Advisors), Jamie Siminoff (Ring), Daniel Feder, CFA (University of Michigan), Prabhakar Reddy (OpenFX), Brandon Schram (640 Oxford), Michael E. Bryan (Serova), Amee Kapadia (Cantos), Zane Hengsperger (NOX METALS), and M13’s very own Carter Reum, Latif Peracha, W. Christine Choi, and Sarah Tomolonius. Plus a conversation with Michigan men’s and women’s basketball coaches and players on building winning teams in the new college sports enterprise. Join us in person at venturesummita2.co or virtually at https://lnkd.in/eHSemYv7

The CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI, and XAI spent this month warning that AI is moving too fast to control. Dario Amodei's version: rogue agents could take over the internet within a year. Here's what keeps me up: agents are already moving money. Stripe says 70% of the commands hitting its API now come from AI agents. Visa, Mastercard, and American Express have all shipped agent commerce protocols this year. The transactions are happening. The trust layer underneath them does not exist yet. We spent 20 years building infrastructure to answer "can I trust this business?" Nobody built the equivalent for "can I trust this agent, who does it represent, and what is it allowed to do?"  That's why M13 led a $35M Series A into Baselayer, as Crunchbase’s Mary Ann Azevedo reported this morning. Jonathan Awad and his team already run identity verification for 1 in 5 U.S. financial institutions, 2,300+ total. More than 10 million applications reviewed, over $1B in fraud losses blocked and revenue up 5x since their last raise.  Today they're extending that network to agents. Baselayer’s new Agentic Identity Suite gives every authorized agent a credential it presents before it transacts, so the business on the other end knows who deployed it, who it represents, and what it's cleared to do. Baselayer calls it KYA. Know Your Agent. Read more in Crunchbase: https://lnkd.in/evhXBFXt