Beltic Out of Stealth: $7.3M Seed Led by Norwest to Verify and Authorize AI Agents
Portfolio update. Beltic came out of stealth on September 30 with a $7.3 million seed led by Norwest, which takes the company to $8.8 million raised since it started in 2025. I have been a small backer since 2025, alongside Collide Capital, Latitud and Positive Ventures, and now Norwest, Restive Ventures and Oxford Seed Fund. Congrats to Isha Bhatnagar, Mike Allan, Farhan Afsahi and the whole team.
The company calls the product Know Your Agent, the agentic equivalent of KYC. When an AI agent shows up at a merchant, a bank or an API to act for a customer, Beltic checks who sent it, whether it is allowed to take the action it is attempting, and whether that action matches what the customer asked for, in real time and on both sides of the transaction. The fraud checks businesses run today assume a human at the keyboard and look for a device fingerprint, a selfie or mouse movements. An agent fails all of them, as Mike Allan told This Week in Fintech, so businesses either block agent traffic or let it through blind.
Agents are starting to book and pay on people's behalf, and the rails they run on were built for people. Someone has to build the trust layer underneath, and this team has built the pieces before. Isha spent six years at Coinbase on the identity and onboarding infrastructure behind its first 50 million users. Mike founded Atar, a banking-as-a-service provider in Brazil that Porto Seguro acquired. Farhan co-founded Verifiet, which Beltic acquired in 2025 and which brought a data platform covering more than 500 million entities across global jurisdictions. Beltic is nine people today, six of them engineers, running pilots and taking on design partners in agentic commerce and payments.
The press release, the This Week in Fintech exclusive by Mary Ann Azevedo and Isha's launch post are below.
The round at a glance
- The seed is $7.3 million, led by Norwest with Restive Ventures, Oxford Seed Fund and Collide Capital.
- Collide Capital led the $1.5 million pre-seed with Latitud Ventures, Positive Ventures and angels, which puts total funding at $8.8 million.
- The product is agent verification infrastructure, sold as Know Your Agent (KYA). It verifies an agent's identity, its authority and the legitimacy of each transaction in real time, on any protocol or payment rail, and it can allow an action, block it or ask for another confirmation.
- Isha Bhatnagar is CEO, Mike Allan is co-founder and COO, and Farhan Afsahi is CTO. The team is nine people, six of them engineers, per This Week in Fintech.
- Beltic was founded in 2025 and is headquartered in San Francisco. Design partners in agentic commerce and payments can reach the team at join@beltic.com.
Beltic
Mary Ann AzevedoIsha's launch post is on LinkedIn and on X. Beltic's company page is here, and the site is beltic.com.
Beltic Emerges from Stealth to Secure Autonomous Agent Transactions at Scale
With $8.8M in funding led by Norwest, new Know Your Agent (KYA) platform empowers companies to confidently do business with agents
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 30, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Beltic, the company building agent verification infrastructure, today emerges from stealth with $7.3 million in Seed funding led by Norwest, with participation from Restive Ventures, Oxford Seed Fund, and Collide Capital, who also led a $1.5 million pre-seed round that included Latitud Ventures, Positive Ventures, and other notable angels. This latest round will fuel Beltic's mission to give businesses the confidence to trust AI agents to act on their behalf. Beltic provides the infrastructure to verify agents and authorize them to take action, creating a safe foundation for the agentic economy.
"As money moves increasingly in real time, identity and trust infrastructure has to keep pace. Beltic is building the verification layer for that future. One that can establish trust instantly, programmatically and portably across businesses, financial institutions and, increasingly, autonomous agents," said Jordan Leites, Principal at Norwest. "Isha and Mike have the rare combination of domain expertise and ambition to define this category, and we're excited to partner with them."
As agents begin initiating transactions on businesses' behalf, merchants, payment providers, financial institutions and card networks need a reliable way to verify that each agent is authorized. This is the foundation of "know your agent" (KYA), the agentic equivalent of "know your customer" (KYC). Without it, AI guardrails have nothing reliable to verify against. Building this trust layer is as urgent as building the payment rails themselves.
"For decades, a large part of risk management was asking and verifying, 'are you human?'," said Isha Bhatnagar, Beltic CEO and co-founder, and former Coinbase head of product for global regulatory experience. "Agents can already gather information on people's behalf. The next opportunity is letting them act autonomously, but the safeguards built to protect humans and businesses have become the barrier. Beltic verifies both the agent and the transaction, so companies can safely accept agent traffic and send agents into the world."
Legacy systems built for human traffic will break under agent traffic. At scale, every transaction requires a new layer of verification: identifying the agent, verifying the entity behind it, and determining whether each action is authorized — all in real time.
"Stakes are even higher when there are no humans in the loop and thousands of transactions per second. One bad decision will not become one bad outcome; it becomes thousands, before anyone notices," said Farhan Afsahi, Beltic's CTO. "AI-native isn't a label: AI-native agent verification requires an AI-native verification stack. We built our whole infrastructure to set the standards for the agentic economy."
As part of that effort, Beltic is spearheading verification for secure agent-to-agent transactions. "Most people envision a simple chain, where a human authorizes an agent and that agent acts, but the reality is recursive," Isha explained. "Agents call other agents, orchestrate further agents beneath them, and hand work to systems they do not own. Each handoff is a delegation event, and risks and assumptions reset in each instance. Inherited trust without verification is simply assumed trust."
Beltic's platform works on both sides of a transaction, at the scale and speed today's most innovative companies demand. This approach is enabled by the founding team's unique combination of identity, payments, and data expertise:
- Isha spent six years at Coinbase building the identity and onboarding infrastructure behind 50 million-plus users and its first institutional clients.
- Co-founder Mike Allan previously founded Atar (acq. Porto Seguro, one of the largest insurance companies in LatAm), a banking-as-a-service provider that scaled across Brazil's payments and core banking systems.
- CTO Farhan Afsahi co-founded Verifiet, which Beltic acquired in 2025, giving the company a global entity data infrastructure platform spanning global jurisdictions and more than 500 million entities.
"Every enterprise is asking us some version of the same question," said Mike. "How do I know this is really my customer's agent, how do I know it's allowed to take this action, and how do I stop the bad ones without blocking the good ones? That's the exact problem we built Beltic to answer. No matter what rails a company is running on, our platform keeps transactions, and the businesses behind them, safe. Getting this right is what unlocks everything else."
Beltic is now partnering with a select group of companies at the forefront of agentic commerce and payments. Design partners will get early access to Beltic's infrastructure and help shape the standards for how agents transact. Interested companies can reach the team at join@beltic.com.
About Beltic
Founded in 2025 and headquartered in San Francisco, Beltic builds agent verification infrastructure. The company's platform verifies the identity, authority, and transactional legitimacy of AI agents in real time, enabling them to safely accept and deploy agentic traffic across any protocol or payment rail. Beltic is backed by Norwest, Restive Ventures, Collide Capital, Oxford Seed Fund, Latitud Ventures, Positive Ventures and notable angels. Learn more at https://beltic.com/.
Media contact: beltic@thekeypr.com
SOURCE Beltic
From the This Week in Fintech exclusive
Mary Ann Azevedo interviewed the founders and Jordan Leites of Norwest for the launch story. What it adds to the release:
- Beltic checks each proposed action against rules the business sets, and the business can see why an action was allowed, blocked or sent back for confirmation. A customer might authorize an agent to compare flights but not to buy one.
- Shortly after the pre-seed, Beltic acquired Verifiet, whose data platform covers more than 500 million entities across multiple countries. That data is the starting point for identifying who is behind an agent.
- The product works on both sides of a transaction. The company sending an agent out specifies what it may do, and the business receiving it checks identity and authority before letting it proceed, which gets harder when an agent hands part of a task to another agent.
- Beltic is running pilots with companies it has not named.
"Identity is not enough," Isha Bhatnagar told This Week in Fintech.
"If your answer to a hijacked agent is that it had a valid credential, then you haven't solved the agent risk. You've just solved agent identity." Isha Bhatnagar
"Our main goal is to help these companies understand that they can safely accept agentic traffic. That's a big challenge right now, and I think that's where we come in." Mike Allan
"Rather than layering an agent credential on top of third-party identity and compliance providers, Beltic owns the underlying data, regulatory context and verification engine that determine whether a business or person can be trusted in the first place." Jordan Leites, Principal at Norwest
