Baselayer raises $35M Series A led by M13 for AI agent identity

Baselayer, an identity-verification startup that already sells fraud-risk tooling to US banks, said it raised a $35 million Series A led by M13 to extend its stack to AI agents. Crunchbase News reported participation from Picus Capital, Torch Capital, Afore Capital and Socure's Matt Thompson, taking the San Francisco company's total raised since its February 2023 founding to roughly $40 million.

The new product, an Agentic Identity Suite, ships with what Baselayer calls "Know Your Agent," or KYA, a system designed to determine who deployed an agent, who it represents, and whether it has permission to carry out particular tasks. Co-founder and CEO Jonathan Awad frames the operational problem bluntly: "Agents spin up and they spin down. How can you trust this random one-task agent?" M13's Karl Alomar makes the strategic case: "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."

The company says its existing Know Your Business tooling is used by more than 2,000 US financial institutions, a footprint it pegs at over 20% of the market, and that it has helped prevent more than $1 billion in fraud losses. Awad describes today's environment as "fraud on steroids right now. It's so easy, it's so cheap, it's so fast, and it's 24/7." Announced launch partners include FIS, Prove and Socure.

Agent-authorization plumbing is a busier category than the round alone suggests: our tracker logged APort Vault's OAP layer for blocking unpermitted AI-agent payments the day before. Baselayer did not disclose the Series A valuation, and the 2,000-institution and $1 billion figures are the company's own.