With $35M in early funding, Baselayer is building the trust layer for the agentic economy
SiliconANGLE Mike Wheatley
Baselayer raised $35M and launched a tool for AI agents to prove who they are. It’s betting identity, not raw model power, is the bottleneck for agentic commerce.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Mike Wheatley — read the original for the full story.
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Baselayer just turned a familiar risk problem into an AI one. The business identity and fraud startup raised $35 million in early-stage funding and used the moment to launch its Agentic Identity Suite, a system it says is built for AI agents that can pay invoices, move money and act for real companies.
The company’s pitch is simple: the rails that move money were built to identify people and ordinary businesses, not software agents acting on their behalf. Stripe said in June that more than 70% of the requests hitting its API came from AI agents, and payments heavyweights including Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Shopify have all rolled out protocols for agentic commerce this year. But the trust layer underneath that activity has not caught up.
Baselayer, officially Osiris Ratings Inc., was founded in 2024 by CEO Jonathan Awad and CTO Timothy Hyde. Its older business verification product is already used by more than 2,300 financial institutions, including one in five U.S. banks. The company says that platform has reviewed more than 10 million applications and stopped more than $1 billion in fraudulent transactions.
Now it is repurposing that infrastructure for agents. The new suite is built around “Know Your Agent,” and aims to cryptographically link an agent’s actions back to the platform that deployed it and the business that authorized it. That creates an auditable trail of responsibility without relying on passwords that can be stolen, which is a cleaner answer than hoping the bots behave themselves.
Baselayer has also built an MCP server and an Agentic Search tool that pulls verified business data from sources such as the Inland Revenue and Secretary of State, so models can anchor decisions in real records instead of hallucinations. Its Counterparty Verification tool is meant to let agents check whether the businesses they are dealing with are legitimate before money changes hands.
The startup is also trying to shape the rules while the market is still young. It says it is working with the FIDO Alliance Authentication Working Group, the Legal Context Protocol and the x402 Identity Working Group, alongside Google, Cloudflare, Visa and Mastercard. The round was led by M13, with participation from Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital and others.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the right bet. Agentic commerce does not need more marketing slogans; it needs a way to answer who sent the bot, who signed for it, and what it’s allowed to touch. The industry keeps treating identity as plumbing until fraud shows up, which is a charming habit if the goal is to lose money slowly and embarrassingly.
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