Baselayer Raises $35M to Build the ‘Know Your Agent’ Layer Agentic Commerce Needs

Baselayer has raised $35 million in a Series A led by M13, with participation from Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital, and Matt Thompson of Socure. The round, announced September 22, marks the first dedicated capital injection into Know Your Agent identity infrastructure — the layer that lets banks, merchants, and platforms verify which AI agent they are dealing with, who it represents, and whether it is authorized to act. For a company already embedded in over 2,300 financial institutions, the raise is a bet that the identity layer is where the binding constraint sits.

From KYB to KYA

Baselayer’s core business is Know Your Business identity verification and fraud detection for financial institutions. Founded in 2024 by machine learning pioneer Timothy Hyde and risk management veteran Jonathan Awad, the company claims its infrastructure has helped customers prevent more than $1 billion in fraud losses — a self-reported figure. The new Agentic Identity Suite extends that same infrastructure to autonomous agents using W3C Verifiable Credentials: cryptographically signed, time-bound, scope-bound tokens that bind an agent to its deploying platform and authorizing business.

“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,” said Jonathan Awad, Baselayer’s CEO. “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?'”

Timothy Hyde, the company’s CTO, framed the technical gap: “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.”

The demand signal

The timing is not accidental. Stripe reported in June 2025 that 70% of the commands used to access data through its API now come from AI agents — a figure Stripe cited in its own materials, though it refers specifically to CLI requests rather than all API traffic. Visa, Mastercard, and American Express have all shipped agent commerce protocols, and Shopify has turned on agentic sales channels by default for roughly one million merchants. The plumbing is arriving faster than the trust layer underneath it.

That trust layer is currently missing. Our analysis of the protocol proliferation tax documented five competing checkout protocols — Visa IC, Mastercard Agent Pay, Stripe ACP, Google UCP, and Meta Muse — each requiring $5,000 to $500,000 in merchant integration costs. Only 3% of transactions currently involve agents. Baselayer’s pitch is that identity verification is the prerequisite merchants need before they will commit to any protocol at all.

The liability wall

The merchant-side resistance is not primarily technical. According to our previous analysis, only 23% of consumers trust AI to handle payment transactions, while 93% of merchants believe the AI provider should bear the financial loss for incorrect purchases. Only 28% are willing to offer their full product range to agents. That liability impasse — documented in our coverage of Visa’s “hundreds vs millions” gap — is the structural barrier that identity infrastructure must address before merchants will open their catalogs.

Baselayer’s framework attempts to close that gap by making the delegation chain auditable. If an agent makes a purchase, the issuing institution, the deploying platform, and the authorizing business are all cryptographically linked to that transaction. The promise is that merchants can accept agent traffic without taking on unbounded fraud risk — a claim that echoes the framing of Alchemy’s AgentCard, which provisions dedicated identity for agents but does not resolve the trust deficit or the liability wall on its own.

The interoperability question

Baselayer is not the only player building identity infrastructure for agents. Five products shipped in five weeks between late August and late September: Okta Agent SSO, Cymphony ($25M), AIUC ($40M), Baselayer ($35M), and Beeline/Insygna. Each addresses a different facet of the identity problem. None interoperates with the others.

The payment networks are pursuing their own path. Visa, Mastercard, and Ant International announced a cross-network KYA interoperability framework in September, but the initiative carries no implementation timeline, no pilot volumes, and no identified merchants. Baselayer is positioning itself inside the standards process — participating in the FIDO Alliance Authentication Working Group, the Legal Context Protocol, and the x402 Identity Working Group alongside Cloudflare, Google, Visa, and Mastercard — but the gap between vendor-specific solutions and cross-network standards remains wide.

The NIST AI Agent Standards Initiative is targeting an interoperability profile for late 2026. Whether Baselayer’s proprietary framework adapts to that standard — or whether the standard adapts to the market reality that Baselayer and others are creating — will determine whether the identity layer consolidates or fragments further.

What to watch

The $35M validates that the identity layer is where money is flowing first in the agentic commerce trust infrastructure buildout. M13, which manages $2.2 billion and has backed 18 companies at seed or Series A that later reached unicorn status, is making a structural bet — not on agents themselves, but on the infrastructure that lets institutions trust them.

Karl Alomar, M13’s managing partner, put the thesis directly: “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. That creates an enormous new trust problem, and we believe identity will become one of the foundational infrastructure layers of the agentic economy.”

The test for Baselayer — and for the market — is whether vendor-specific KYA credentials become the de facto standard because they arrive first and work at scale, or whether the industry holds out for the cross-network interoperability that the payment networks are promising but have not delivered. The next twelve months will reveal which path the money follows.