Baselayer raises $35 million Series A to build trust, compliance, and security infrastructure for autonomous AI agent orchestration and deployment.
Business identity and risk infrastructure startup Baselayer has raised $35 million in Series A funding to build what it describes as the first interoperable trust layer and fraud prevention platform designed specifically for the agentic economy. The funding will support the company as it tackles a rapidly growing security challenge: the rise of AI agents actively engaged in commerce, conducting transactions, paying invoices, and moving money on behalf of businesses.
Evidence of this shift is substantial. Payment processor Stripe reported in June that more than 70% of API requests it receives now come from AI agents. Major financial and e-commerce infrastructure providers—Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Shopify—have all deployed protocols to support agentic commerce this year.
Yet these providers face a fundamental problem: identity. The legacy financial infrastructure used to process transactions was designed to identify humans and traditional businesses, not autonomous software acting on their behalf. When an AI agent initiates a transaction, banks and merchants cannot determine who the agent is, which entity it represents, or whether it can be trusted.
Baselayer, officially known as Osiris Ratings Inc., was founded in 2024 by Chief Executive Jonathan Awad, a risk management expert, and Chief Technology Officer Timothy Hyde, a machine learning pioneer. The company originally built business identity verification tools now used by more than 2,300 financial institutions, including one in five U.S. banks. Its platform has reviewed more than 10 million applications and prevented over $1 billion in fraudulent transactions. It is now retrofitting that trust infrastructure for AI agents.
"Every new era of commerce has required a new kind of trust layer to be built," Awad said. "Historically that infrastructure gets built only after fraud and abuse make the problem impossible to ignore. 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?'"
The company's response is the Agentic Identity Suite, grounded in a "Know Your Agent" framework. It enables financial institutions to cryptographically trace an AI agent's actions back to the platform that deployed it and the specific business that authorized it, creating an auditable chain of liability without relying on passwords vulnerable to theft.
Baselayer has developed a Model Context Protocol server and Agentic Search tool that grounds AI models in verified business data from authoritative sources such as the Inland Revenue and Secretary of State, helping verify that agent decisions are based on reality rather than hallucinations. Its Counterparty Verification technology allows agents themselves to verify the legitimacy of businesses they transact with, protecting companies from engaging with fraudulent entities.
Beyond building the infrastructure for compliant and secure agentic commerce, Baselayer is participating in the development of new standards for the agentic economy. It is currently collaborating with the FIDO Alliance Authentication Working Group, the Legal Context Protocol, and the x402 Identity Working Group, alongside Google, Cloudflare, Visa, and Mastercard.
The Series A round was led by M13, with participation from Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital, and others. M13 Managing Partner Karl Alomar noted that AI agents have become major economic actors despite the absence of identity infrastructure designed for them. "This creates an enormous new trust problem," Alomar said. "Identity will become one of the foundational infrastructure layers of the agentic economy. 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."