Baselayer bets on agentic economy trust layer with $35M Series A and Agentic Identity Suite

The agentic economy is accelerating faster than the trust infrastructure built around it. Baselayer (Osiris Ratings Inc.) raised $35 million in a Series A round led by M13 and launched the Agentic Identity Suite, described as the first interoperable trust layer and fraud prevention platform built specifically for AI agents. For builders shipping agentic commerce, this is the kind of plumbing that determines whether autonomous transactions scale or stall.

What Baselayer built and why now

Baselayer started as a business identity verification platform now used by more than 2,300 financial institutions, including one in five U.S. banks. Its system has reviewed over 10 million applications and prevented more than $1 billion in fraudulent transactions. The new Agentic Identity Suite extends that infrastructure to AI agents with four components: Know Your Agent, a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, Agentic Search, and Counterparty Verification.

The core problem is simple. When an AI agent initiates a transaction, banks and merchants have no way to know who that agent is, who it represents, or what it is allowed to do. Legacy financial rails were designed for humans and traditional businesses. Stripe reported in June that more than 70% of API requests now come from AI agents, and Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Shopify have all deployed protocols to support agentic commerce this year. The infrastructure to make those transactions auditable and safe does not yet exist at scale.

The practical difference for agentic commerce

Know Your Agent lets financial institutions cryptographically trace an AI agent's actions back to the platform that deployed it and the business that authorized it, creating an auditable chain of liability without relying on passwords. The MCP server and Agentic Search tool ground AI decisions in verified business data from authoritative sources like Inland Revenue and Secretary of State, which reduces the risk of hallucinations driving real-world actions. Counterparty Verification lets agents themselves check the legitimacy of businesses they transact with.

Baselayer is not building this alone. It collaborates with the FIDO Alliance Authentication Working Group, the Legal Context Protocol, and the x402 Identity Working Group, alongside Google, Cloudflare, Visa, and Mastercard to shape standards for agentic identity. For builders, that signals that the agentic economy trust layer is becoming a shared infrastructure problem rather than something each platform solves in isolation.

What to watch and what remains uncertain

The announcement is a product and funding milestone, not a deployed network. Baselayer is retrofitting its existing business identity infrastructure for AI agents, and deployment timelines, regulatory alignment, and adoption by financial institutions are still evolving. The company claims widespread use in risk infrastructure today, but broader operational deployment for agents at scale will depend on interoperability standards and compliance frameworks that are still being drafted.

CEO Jonathan Awad put it directly: "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?'" That question is the right one. Whether Baselayer becomes the default answer depends on execution and adoption across the payments stack.

For now, builders evaluating agentic commerce should treat identity and liability as first-class design constraints, not afterthoughts. The infrastructure to solve them is starting to emerge."