A San Francisco company that banks already trust to vet merchants wants the same job done for software that buys on a customer’s behalf. Baselayer has closed a $35 million Series A, money it will use to push its business identity network beyond companies and onto the AI agents that act for them.
M13 led the Series A. The round also brought in Picus Capital, Torch Capital, Afore Capital and Matt Thompson of Socure, each signing on as an outside backer of the company. Total funding now sits near $40 million for the company, legally Osiris Ratings.
Jonathan Awad and Timothy Hyde, who founded it, pitch a hybrid: an identity network for checking businesses, plus a fraud consortium whose members pool what they learn. Banks and fintechs come to it before onboarding or underwriting a merchant, and more than 2,000 US financial institutions, over a fifth of the market, are on the network. Fraud losses its customers avoided now exceed $1 billion, by the company’s own count.
Alongside the raise it unwrapped an Agentic Identity Suite, built around a framework it calls Know Your Agent. The question it answers: is this autonomous process genuinely cleared to act for the person or business it claims? That matters because agents often spin up for one task and then vanish, leaving nothing for a risk team to inspect.
Payments moved first
Agentic commerce outran the identity plumbing built to police it. Stripe says most API requests it handles now originate with agents, and card networks along with Shopify have shipped agent protocols of their own. Baselayer’s bet: verification becomes a shared utility, and whoever can see the same company applying at two rival institutions holds the strongest signal.
