Baselayer, an identity and risk infrastructure provider used by one in five US financial institutions, has secured $35m in Series A funding and unveiled a product designed to verify autonomous software before it transacts.
M13 led the round, joined by Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital and Socure’s Matt Thompson. Alongside the raise, Baselayer introduced its Agentic Identity Suite, which it describes as the first interoperable trust layer and agentic fraud consortium built for the global agentic economy.
The company argues that commerce driven by AI agents is expanding faster than the safeguards needed to support it. Stripe revealed in June that AI agents now generate 70% of the commands used to pull data through its API.
Over the past 12 months, Visa, Mastercard and American Express have each released protocols for agent-led commerce, while Shopify activated agentic sales channels by default for around one million merchants.
This shift exposes a gap in financial systems designed to identify humans and companies rather than software acting for them. Before permitting an agent to complete a transaction, a bank, merchant or platform must establish whom the agent represents, whether it holds authority to act, and whether the counterparty can be trusted.
Baselayer already addresses these questions for businesses. Its identity verification and risk platform serves more than 2,300 financial institutions and payments firms, and has helped clients avoid over $1bn in fraud losses. Machine learning specialist Timothy Hyde and risk management veteran Jonathan Awad launched the company in 2024, and they are now applying the same infrastructure to autonomous agents.
To meet growing enterprise demand, Baselayer collaborates with agent developers, card networks, financial institutions and payments businesses such as FIS, Prove, Socure, Exa, Parallel Web Systems, Natural, Nevermined and Lane. The firm is also contributing to emerging standards for the sector, participating in the FIDO Alliance Authentication Working Group, the Legal Context Protocol and the x402 Identity Working Group, alongside Cloudflare, Google, Visa and Mastercard.
Baselayer co-founder and CEO Jonathan Awad said, “Every era of commerce has required a new trust layer, but historically that infrastructure gets built only after fraud and abuse make the problem impossible to ignore.
“Agentic commerce is moving too fast for the industry to repeat that mistake. We already help one in five U.S. financial institutions answer, ‘Can I trust this business?’ Now we’re building the infrastructure they need to answer, ‘Can I trust this agent, who does it represent, and what is it allowed to do?'”
Baselayer co-founder and CTO Timothy Hyde added, “Agents don’t carry ID, and the infrastructure built to verify humans and businesses simply doesn’t recognize them. Static fraud controls end up blocking good customers while sophisticated attacks walk through. We built the Agentic Identity Suite so any institution can know, cryptographically, which agent it’s dealing with, who that agent represents, and whether its own agent can safely proceed with any transaction.”
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