Exclusive: Can You Trust That AI Agent? Baselayer Raises $35M To Help Companies Decide

Baselayer, an AI-driven startup that assists financial institutions in verifying businesses and evaluating fraud risk, has secured $35 million in funding to extend its identity technology to AI agents. The San Francisco-based company, which has raised a total of around $40 million since its inception in 2023, is led by co-founders Jonathan Awad and Timothy Hyde. The latest round of financing was led by M13, with participation from Picus Capital, Torch Capital, Afore Capital, and Matt Thompson of Socure.

Baselayer's technology combines business identity, credit, and fraud data to help financial institutions assess prospective customers. The company sells its products directly and through software vendors that resell or rebrand the technology. Over 2,000 financial institutions, representing over 20% of such institutions in the U.S., currently use Baselayer's technology for onboarding, underwriting, and account opening for merchants.

The startup claims to have helped its customers prevent over $1 billion in fraud losses since its founding.

Now, Baselayer is targeting a new challenge: determining whether an AI agent is authorized to act on behalf of a particular person or business. As people increasingly use AI agents for tasks like booking restaurant reservations, it becomes difficult to distinguish legitimate automated activity from bots attempting to scrape data or commit fraud. To address this issue, Baselayer is launching its Agentic Identity Suite, which extends its identity network to AI agents acting on behalf of businesses.

The company's automated platform initially focused on Know Your Business (KYB) identity verification, fraud detection, and risk management. With the new funding, Baselayer aims to develop a Know Your Agent (KYA) system to verify AI agents' credentials. The system will help merchants, financial institutions, and online platforms determine whether an agent is authorized to perform a specific task, thereby preventing unauthorized or fraudulent activities.

Baselayer is working with agent developers, payment processors, and fraud-detection providers to create and recognize its credential.