Business identity and risk infrastructure startup Baselayer is shifting its attention to artificial intelligence agents after raising $35 million in early-stage funding today.
Alongside the Series A round, it’s announcing the launch of its Agentic Identity Suite, which it says is the first interoperable trust layer and fraud prevention platform designed specifically for the agentic economy.
The funding will help Baselayer, officially known as Osiris Ratings Inc., tackle what it says is a rapidly growing security challenge amid the rise of agentic commerce. These days, frontier AI models are increasingly active in the e-commerce realm, paying invoices and moving money on behalf of real businesses.
Evidence of that comes from the payment processing firm Stripe Inc., which said in June that more than 70% of the requests received by its application programming interface came from AI agents. It’s joined by payments and e-commerce infrastructure giants like Visa Inc., Mastercard Inc., American Express Co. Inc. and Shopify Inc., which have all deployed protocols to support agentic commerce this year.
Unfortunately, these providers are not yet ready to support AI agent commerce at this kind of scale, for there’s a major problem: identity. The legacy financial rails they currently use to transact were designed to identify humans and traditional businesses rather than autonomous software that acts on their behalf. When an AI agent initiates a transaction, banks and merchants have no way of knowing who that agent is, who it’s acting for, or if it can be trusted.
Baselayer believes it’s ideally suited to solve this problem for the payments industry. It was founded in 2024 by Chief Executive Jonathan Awad, an expert in risk management, and Chief Technology Officer Timothy Hyde, who is said to be a pioneer in machine learning.
The startup originally focused on building business identity verification tools that are now used by more than 2,300 financial institutions, including one in five U.S. banks. So far, its business identification platform has reviewed more than 10 million applications and prevented over $1 billion in fraudulent transactions, and now it’s retrofitting that trust infrastructure for AI agents.
Awad said every new era of commerce has required a new kind of trust layer to be built. “Historically that infrastructure gets built only after fraud and abuse make the problem impossible to ignore,” he said. “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’s solution is the Agentic Identity Suite, which is based on the concept of “Know Your Agent.” It provides financial institutions with the tools they need to cryptographically trace an AI agent’s actions back to the platform that first deployed it and the specific business that authorized it to act on its behalf, creating an auditable chain of liability without relying on sensitive passwords that could easily be stolen.
The startup has also developed a Model Context Protocol server and Agentic Search tool that enables it to ground AI models in verified business data pulled from authoritative sources such as the Inland Revenue and Secretary of State to help verify that agents’ decisions are based on reality and not hallucinations. Meanwhile, its Counterparty Verification technology makes it possible for the agents themselves to verify the legitimacy of businesses they’re transacting with, protecting companies from transacting with fraudulent entities.
Baselayer said its goal is not only to develop the infrastructure required to support compliant and secure agentic commerce, but also participate in drawing up new standards for the agentic economy. That’s why it’s currently collaborating with the FIDO Alliance Authentication Working Group, the Legal Context Protocol and the x402 Identity Working Group, alongside major firms like Google LLC, Cloudflare Inc., Visa and Mastercard.
Today’s round was led by M13 and saw participation from Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital and others. M13 Managing Partner Karl Alomar said AI agents have emerged from nowhere to become major actors in the economy. That’s despite the fact that the identity infrastructure around them was never built for software that opens accounts, purchases goods and services and moves money on behalf of humans and businesses.
“This creates an enormous new trust problem, and we believe identity will become one of the foundational infrastructure layers of the agentic economy,” Alomar said. “What made Baselayer especially compelling is that Jonathan and Timothy are not starting from a whiteboard. They already have a network spanning more than 2,300 financial institutions, deep risk data and infrastructure in production today.”
