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Baselayer Raised $35 Million for AI Agent Verification

The startup provides infrastructure for financial institutions to secure and verify autonomous AI agents.

Updated on Sept. 26, 2026 in Startups

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Baselayer, an identity infrastructure provider for financial AI, secured $35 million in Series A funding to expand its agent verification services. AI Illustration. Upload story photo >

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Do you trust financial institutions to secure your money against mistakes made by AI agents?

Baselayer secured $35 million in a Series A funding round to scale its Know Your Agent verification services for financial institutions. The company now claims that 2,300 institutions currently use its platform to authorize AI agents.

Why it matters

As financial institutions adopt autonomous AI, they face critical security challenges in ensuring that agents are authorized to act. This funding enables Baselayer to accelerate the build-out of technical standards for identity and authorization in AI-driven finance.

Baselayer has raised $35 million in its Series A round, bringing total capital to approximately $40 million since its 2023 founding. The firm reports that 2,300 financial institutions now utilize its verification platform.

The players

Baselayer

A New York-based startup providing identity and authorization infrastructure for AI agents in the financial services sector.

M13

A venture capital firm that focuses on investing in early-stage technology companies.

HKT Payment

A financial services entity that recently launched a pilot program to test AI agent verification in the Hong Kong market.

The details

Baselayer provides identity infrastructure by issuing signed SD-JWT verifiable credentials to AI agents, which are then bound to public keys. Financial institutions act as verifiers by checking these credential signatures to confirm the identity and permissions of the agent. This mechanism allows firms to restrict agent actions to those explicitly approved by a delegator.

Timeline

  1. Baselayer was founded in 2023.

  2. The company raised a $6.5 million seed round in May 2024.

  3. HKT Payment began an AI agent verification pilot in Hong Kong on August 27, 2026.

  4. Baselayer announced the $35 million Series A round on September 22, 2026.

Market Landscape

Baselayer is building its service layer upon the foundation of SD-JWT verifiable credentials to standardize how entities manage trust in automated systems. This follows a broader trend of fintechs attempting to bridge the gap between experimental AI agent capabilities and institutional security requirements.

Operators at financial institutions should monitor the integration of verifiable credentialing as a potential requirement for future AI agent deployments. Ensure any adoption of these tools includes internal verification of the provider's claims, given that current fraud prevention metrics remain unaudited.

The takeaway

Baselayer’s funding highlights the growing importance of securing AI-to-AI transactions within traditional finance. Business leaders should track whether such standardized identity frameworks become a regulatory prerequisite for deploying autonomous agents in client-facing applications.

Further reading

For more on the evolving infrastructure supporting new financial technology, see the Startups section.

Source note: This article includes information reported by The Industry Spread.

Live Poll

Do you trust financial institutions to secure your money against mistakes made by AI agents?