Dive Brief:

• Basis Theory, the payments infrastructure provider, has raised $33 million in a new funding round, the company said in a press release Tuesday.
• The funding will support the company’s agentic e-commerce objectives and expand its enterprise-level payments for international companies. The company has 40 full-time employees, and plans to hire additional staff for its engineering, product and go-to-market teams, according to the announcement.
• The investment firm Costanoa Ventures led the funding round, with Stage 2 Capital and Moneta Ventures joining previous investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Kindred Ventures, Box Group and Offline Ventures, the announcement said.

Dive Insight:

With its latest funding round, Basis Theory has raised about $50 million, a spokesperson for the company said. Basis Theory aims to grow its employee headcount to meet rising demand for its services and “unlock the next era of innovation in artificial intelligence-driven commerce,” according to the release. 

“Earlier this year, as we saw the agentic commerce wave coming and decided to jump in with both feet,” Basis Theory CEO Colin Luce wrote in a company blog post on Tuesday. 

Since its founding in 2020, Basis Theory has added major payment players and tech companies to its client roster, including MoneyGram, Pinterest, and Melio, per the press release. Its founders bring prior experience from payments firms like Yodlee, Klarna and Dwolla, the release noted. 

The company launched its agentic commerce platform in June. In the coming months, the capital infusion will enable the company to develop its agentic AI capabilities, introduce additional payment methods, expand payment capabilities across borders and help companies adopt agentic products, Luce noted in the blog post. 

“Because agentic commerce enables AI agents to handle shopping and transactions on behalf of human users, this investment will help merchants, platforms, and even machines move beyond simple assistance and start transacting more confidently and securely,” Luce wrote.

Other major payment and tech companies have been riding the agentic AI wave in recent months. Merchant processor Worldpay plans to adjust its parameters in response to agentic AI purchases. Also, tech titan Google and digital payments player Stripe have introduced new protocols for conducting such transactions.

Though payment companies are devoting resources to agentic AI, allowing bots to conduct transactions on behalf of consumers could introduce new cybersecurity risks, experts warn. If fraudsters, for example, manipulate the AI agents with prompts, they could give the tool malicious instructions to change its buying behaviors, Jeff Otto, chief marketing officer of Riskified, said in an interview earlier this year.