Baselayer has raised a $35 million Series A to sell “Know Your Agent” checks to banks, and the most interesting number in the September 22, 2026 announcement is not the round size. It is the claim that 2,300+ financial institutions already use the company, a figure the New York startup has never split between direct contracts and customers reached through resellers such as FIS, Prove and Socure. For a Series A company, that distinction decides whether the agent product lands on a ready-made verifier network or has to build one.

M13 led the round, with Torch Capital, Picus, Afore Capital and Matt Thompson of Socure participating. No valuation was disclosed. The Series A follows a $6.5 million seed round in May 2024 backed by Torch, Afore, Founder Collective, Picus and Gilgamesh Ventures. Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Awad told Crunchbase News that total funding stands at about $40 million since the company’s 2023 inception, slightly below the $41.5 million the two disclosed rounds add up to.

What the 2,300 figure actually covers

Baselayer’s own wording shifts depending on the page. The press release says the platform serves “2,300+ financial institutions and payments companies”, which is broader than banks. The same release calls the company “trusted by 1 in 5 financial institutions nationwide”. Its banks and credit unions page says 2,300+ institutions while citing a fraud consortium of “2,200+ peer institutions”, and a company post announcing a new Head of Growth referred to “a network of over 2,200 financial institutions”.

“Network” is the operative word. TechTimes described FIS, Prove and Socure as reseller relationships, and FIS’s own quote on Baselayer’s site speaks of bringing Baselayer “into the workflows of the thousands of financial institutions we serve”. Having tracked how core-processor distribution inflates vendor logo counts, I read 2,300 as reach through platforms, not 2,300 signed bank contracts. Baselayer has not broken the number out, and TechTimes noted that its $1 billion fraud-prevented claim has not been independently audited.

What Know Your Agent verifies that KYB does not

Know Your Business (KYB) tells a bank the company is real. Baselayer’s API documentation shows what Know Your Agent (KYA) adds. Baselayer mints a signed SD-JWT verifiable credential for a person or business it has already verified, scopes it to a named counterparty “audience”, and binds it to the presenting agent’s public key. A merchant or bank checks the signature and sees who delegated the agent without the agent carrying reusable passwords.

Revocation runs through a published token status list: a revoked credential’s bit flips and verifiers refuse it “from their next list fetch”. That means revocation is only as fast as each verifier’s polling interval. Each credential’s token ID also resolves to an issuance record, which the docs call “the dispute-evidence answer to ‘was this agent authorized, for whom, and had it been revoked?'”

Spend limits are notably absent from Baselayer’s own endpoints. Partner Nevermined supplies what its Chief Revenue Officer Josh Wadinski calls “clear spending boundaries”, with Baselayer layering identity on top. That split mirrors the stack Natural built with its agentic payments rails, and Natural is among the partners named in Baselayer’s release.

“We already help one in five U.S. financial institutions answer, ‘Can I trust this business?'” Awad said in the release. “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?'”

Regulators: pilots abroad, silence at home

No US supervisor has issued rules requiring AI agent verification. The closest live test is in Hong Kong, where HKT Payment said on August 27, 2026 it had been selected for the regulators’ GenA.I. Sandbox++ to pilot registration and verification for agent-initiated payments. HKT said existing KYC and KYB frameworks “were not designed to address the verification of AI agents or determine who is ultimately responsible for their actions.”

That responsibility question already has a default answer in US consumer payments. Under Regulation E, 12 CFR 1005.2(m), a transfer is not “unauthorized” if it is initiated by a person the consumer furnished the access device to, unless the consumer has told the institution that person’s transfers are no longer authorized. A consumer who hands credentials to an agent may therefore own its mistakes. A signed, revocable delegation record is the evidence that would settle such disputes, which is the gap the Rain agentic payments alliance left unaddressed on liability.

What comes next

Baselayer is not alone. Socure, a Baselayer partner whose Matt Thompson joined the round, is building its own KYA capabilities, according to TechTimes, and Visa’s move on behavioral biometrics via its $2.4bn BioCatch deal shows card networks want the fraud layer in-house. Awad told TechTimes that bank relationships take 12 to 18 months to establish. Until a regulator makes agent credentials mandatory, adoption will depend on whether the FIS, Prove and Socure channels behind that 2,300 figure turn the first KYA credentials into something banks actually check.

Rick Steves

Rick Steves has seen business and economics through many lenses. He joined the financial services industry in 2009, and has been a financial journalist since 2011. He holds a degree in Business Administration and has experience producing real-time news, from both buy-side and sell-side, as well as for retail traders, brokers and service providers. Steves' work has appeared in a variety of online publications including FX Street, NewsBTC, FinanceFeeds, and The Industry Spread. Rick has great interest in the dynamics of the trading industry. The never-ending clash between technology, economics, regulation, and more importantly, the people.