Verifiable chain-of-custody infrastructure for AI agents in regulated finance and commerce.
AI agents already commit code, buy goods, update records and move money. Regulated buyers still cannot prove who authorized which agent, under what scope, for which organisation or product, and whether that authority was still valid.
Current stacks show a login or a payment approval. They do not show the full authority chain behind an autonomous action.
Banks and fintechs need reconstructable evidence months later: principal, agent, policy, scope, expiry, revocation and logs.
Identity, payment and product-passport tools each verify one party. The missing product is the signed relationship between parties.
Agentic AI is entering financial workflows while Europe implements its densest regulatory wave in a generation — DORA, PSD3, FiDA, the AML package and the EU AI Act. Institutions need infrastructure, platforms and guardrails that make AI-native finance safe enough to deploy.
Sign AI-agent code commits and tool calls with human, employer and policy authority.
Attach the same delegation chain to fintech operations, support agents and agentic commerce flows.
Turn repeated authority patterns into reusable policy templates and evidence modules.
Identity infrastructure, non-human-identity governance, product-passport tooling and agent-economy rails converge on the same regulated buyer over 2026–2030. All forward numbers are hypothesis-marked and re-based on pilot data.
Identity infrastructure ($30B+) · non-human-identity governance ($25B) · DPP / product-passport tooling ($8B) · agent-economy rails ($50B+, a16z / Bessemer thesis range).
| Category | Strongest player | Scale (reported) | What they don't ship |
|---|---|---|---|
| Human PoP | Worldcoin / World | $250M+ raised | No org / product graph; agent linking is a binary tether, not a scoped mandate. |
| Agent pay | Catena Labs (a16z) | $18M | Payments-only delegation; no products, no audit chain beyond the transaction. |
| Enterprise NHI | Astrix → Cisco | ~$300M acq. | Cloud-IAM scope; no consumer side, no products, single-protocol governance. |
| Product DPP | Avery Dennison atma.io | 30B+ items | No identity graph; centralized SaaS with no agent or delegation layer. |
| ID infra | Spruce ID | $41M+ raised | Protocol toolkit; closest architecturally, but no shipped four-node graph. |
| The graph | identity.free | All 4 nodes | Passports for every node plus the signed, revocable, auditable edges between them. |
Free, usage-metered signing for agent commits and tool calls. The wedge that seeds the policy graph.
Policy orchestration, delegation management and audit-log retention for security and platform teams.
Regulator-ready evidence modules per sector for banks, fintechs, marketplaces and agent platforms.
12 years across fintech, identity and regulated infrastructure. Founded SREDA.Ventures, an early fintech-only VC, and a compliance-first digital bank Arival.com — working through KYC, AML, cross-border onboarding and auditability from the operator side. Author of the long-running Money of the Future research series.
identity.free is the focused venture layer of that lived problem: make AI-agent authority reusable, verifiable and safe enough for regulated finance.
Hands-on familiarity with banking operations, compliance evidence, onboarding friction and institutional risk tolerance.
Long-running research arc around digital identity, reusable credentials and trust infrastructure.
Clear wedge into autonomous agents as financial institutions move from pilots to production workflows.
Customer discovery, fintech design partners, mentor pressure and investor narrative sharpening.
to validate the trust layer for AI-native finance with real banks, fintechs and enterprise buyers.
customer discovery, pilot design and investor-ready positioning.