Baselayer, a B2B platform utilising proprietary Graph AI technology, has officially emerged from stealth mode, securing a $6.5m seed round.
Founded by Jonathan Awad and Timothy Hyde, Baselayer boasts an experienced team of compliance and machine learning experts. The platform has garnered attention by acquiring nearly 30 customers in less than six months, including prominent names like Rho and one of the top-five loan infrastructure systems.
Investors in the seed round include Torch Capital, Afore Capital, Founder Collective, Picus Capital, Gilgamesh Ventures, and notable financial industry executives such as Eric Woodward, former President of Early Warning Services, and executives from Stripe, Brex, Valley Bank, and Airbase, among others.
Baselayer’s mission is to streamline business onboarding processes while combating fraud in the banking sector. With the advancement of fraud tactics costing global banks $500bn in 2023, Baselayer aims to simplify the Know Your Business (KYB) review process, which traditionally involves lengthy manual verifications that can take days or even weeks.
Jonathan Awad, CEO and Co-Founder of Baselayer, stated, “For a new or small business, waiting days or weeks to have access to a bank account can be devastating. Without a bank account, it’s impossible to run a business, and as fraud has gotten more sophisticated, it’s become even more difficult for banks to verify small or new companies. We saw this problem firsthand, so we built our own solution that provides all banks, lenders, and payments companies on our platform access to fraud sharing on businesses that does not exist anywhere else in the market. Baselayer can now identify, assess and predict the risk of all potential business customers in real-time, eliminating the friction that has previously existed in the KYB process to provide more security to the banking system than ever before.”
Awad’s personal experience, unable to secure a business banking account due to bank failures, led him and Hyde to develop Baselayer. Leveraging AI-generated knowledge graphs, Baselayer can predict and differentiate legitimate from fraudulent patterns, enabling financial institutions to swiftly verify the legitimacy and assess the risk of new business customers in real-time.
Eric Woodward, former President of Early Warning, praised Baselayer’s innovation, stating, “All consumers will ultimately be businesses. This underscores the importance of banks and providers being able to quickly and accurately assess and verify the identities and risks of small businesses at scale. While there have been tremendous innovations in consumer verifications, there has not been a comparable solution in the market to secure and simplify the KYB process, which Baselayer is now uniquely providing.”
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