Basis Theory, an independent payments infrastructure company, this week announced a $33 million Series B round led by Costanoa, with participation from Stage 2 Capital, Moneta VC, and continued support from Bessemer Venture Partners, Kindred Ventures, Box Group, and Offline Ventures. The funding will accelerate its work with agentic commerce while expanding its enterprise-grade payment vault for merchants worldwide.
With merchants seeking better ways to manage payment data across multiple payment service providers, product leaders view payments as a strategic growth lever instead of a cost center. However, building these capabilities requires navigating significant compliance and technical complexities. With Basis Theory, customers can tokenize and manage sensitive payment data—maintaining complete control over how it’s accessed within their own systems or shared with external partners.
“The payments ecosystem is changing rapidly, and merchants no longer want to be locked into rigid platforms,” said Colin Luce, co-founder and CEO of Basis Theory. “We’re giving control back by making payments data as accessible and programmable as any other data type so it can fuel growth, intelligence, and automation across the entire business.”
At the core of Basis Theory’s platform is a cloud-native, PCI-compliant vault that operates independently of any payment processor or orchestration layer. The vault serves as the foundation for agentic commerce, and the Agentic Commerce Consortium—a network of more than 20 companies collaborating to build the future of agent-led commerce. Led by Basis Theory, the consortium is defining the standards and infrastructure that allow AI agents to become trusted buyers, enabling merchants to participate safely in agentic commerce at scale.
“Basis Theory is at the forefront of a dramatic shift as AI reshapes e-commerce as we know it,” said Amy Cheetham, partner at Costanoa. “By giving merchants secure, real-time control over payment data, Basis Theory enables AI agents to authorize transactions, personalize experiences, and drive autonomous purchasing. They aren’t just keeping up with the future of commerce, they’re building it.”
Basis Theory was founded in 2020 by fintech veterans Brian Billingsley, Luce, and Ben Milne, whose experience spans industry leaders like Yodlee, Dwolla, and Klarna. It has more than 40 full-time employees and plans to expand its engineering, product, and go-to-market teams to unlock the next era of innovation in payments and AI-driven commerce.
