Beltic, a San Francisco-based company building agent verification infrastructure, has emerged from stealth with US$8.8 million in total funding. The total includes a US$7.3 million Seed round led by Norwest and a US$1.5 million Pre-Seed round led by Collide Capital. The company said the capital will accelerate its mission to help businesses trust AI agents that act on their behalf and support the emerging agentic economy.
The Need for Know Your Agent Infrastructure
Beltic is focused on Know Your Agent, or KYA, a category it describes as the agentic equivalent of Know Your Customer protocols. As autonomous agents begin initiating transactions for businesses, merchants, payment providers, and financial institutions need reliable ways to verify that each agent is authorized. Without this trust layer, the company argues, AI guardrails have nothing dependable to check against and legacy systems built for human traffic will struggle under agent traffic.
Investor and Founder Perspectives
Jordan Leites, Principal at Norwest, said identity and trust infrastructure must keep pace as money moves increasingly in real time. He added that Beltic is building a verification layer that can establish trust instantly, programmatically, and portably across businesses, financial institutions, and autonomous agents. Leites also noted that founders Isha Bhatnagar and Mike Allan have the domain expertise and ambition to define the category.
How the Platform Addresses Agent Risk
Beltic's platform operates on both sides of a transaction and verifies the agent, the entity behind it, and whether each action is authorized in real time. Co-founder and CEO Isha Bhatnagar said agents can already gather information on people's behalf, but the next opportunity is letting them act autonomously. She added that Beltic verifies both the agent and the transaction, so companies can safely accept agent traffic and send agents into the world.
Securing Recursive Agent-to-Agent Transactions
Beltic is also working to secure agent-to-agent transactions, which can involve recursive delegation chains where agents call other agents and hand work to systems they do not own. The company said each handoff is a delegation event where risks and assumptions reset, meaning inherited trust without verification is simply assumed trust. CTO Farhan Afsahi warned that one bad decision in a high-volume, human-free environment can become thousands of bad outcomes before anyone notices.
Founding Team and Data Infrastructure
The founding team brings a combination of identity, payments, and data expertise to the platform. Bhatnagar previously spent six years at Coinbase building identity and onboarding infrastructure for more than 50 million users. Co-founder Mike Allan founded Atar, a banking-as-a-service provider acquired by Porto Seguro, while Afsahi co-founded Verifiet, which Beltic acquired in 2025 to gain global entity data spanning more than 500 million entities.
Design Partners and Market Adoption
Beltic is now partnering with a select group of companies at the forefront of agentic commerce and payments. Design partners will receive early access to Beltic's infrastructure and help shape the standards for how agents transact. The company said enterprise customers consistently ask how to identify a customer's agent, confirm its authority, and stop bad actors without blocking legitimate activity.
Beltic's emergence from stealth reflects growing demand for verification systems as autonomous agents move beyond information gathering and into transactional roles. The company aims to provide a foundation for secure agentic commerce across any protocol or payment rail. Its backing from Norwest and other investors, combined with early design partner engagement, positions Beltic to influence how businesses safely accept and deploy agent traffic at scale.