As merchants begin to view payments less as a fixed cost and more as a programmable growth asset, one startup is arming them with the infrastructure to take back control. San Francisco-based Basis Theory, a developer-first payments infrastructure company, has raised $33 million in Series B funding, positioning itself at the intersection of secure data control, artificial intelligence, and modern merchant payments. The round was led by Costanoa Ventures, with participation from Stage 2 Capital, Moneta VC, and follow-on support from existing backers including Bessemer Venture Partners, Kindred Ventures, Box Group, and Offline Ventures.
Founded in 2020 by fintech veterans Brian Billingsley, Colin Luce, and Ben Milne—alumni of companies like Yodlee, Dwolla, and Klarna—Basis Theory provides a cloud-native, PCI Level 1-compliant vault that allows merchants to tokenize, store, and programmatically control payment data. Importantly, the platform is independent of any specific payment processor or orchestration layer, giving customers the flexibility to switch providers, build custom flows, and optimize performance—without getting trapped in a black-box ecosystem.
“We’re giving control back by making payments data as accessible and programmable as any other data type,” said Colin Luce, Co-founder and CEO of Basis Theory. “That unlocks not just cost efficiency, but intelligence and automation across the business.”
This infrastructure forms the backbone of what the company calls “agentic commerce”—an emerging paradigm in which AI agents, acting on behalf of consumers or businesses, can autonomously initiate, authorize, and optimize transactions. Basis Theory is also leading the Agentic Commerce Consortium, a group of over 20 companies collaborating to set the standards for this new kind of AI-powered transaction layer.
With clients like Pinterest, Melio, and MoneyGram, Basis Theory is already proving its model in environments where payment data agility and compliance are critical. As Amy Cheetham, Partner at Costanoa, puts it: “They aren’t just keeping up with the future of commerce—they’re building it.”
Editorial Analysis: Rewriting the Merchant-Processor Relationship
For decades, payment infrastructure has been defined by lock-in. Once a merchant chose a processor, the underlying data—and often, future strategy—was effectively held hostage. Basis Theory flips that equation. By decoupling sensitive data from payment service providers, it gives product and engineering teams the flexibility to design payments workflows like any other part of the stack—configurable, testable, and portable.
What makes this moment particularly potent is the arrival of AI agents in commerce. As enterprises experiment with AI-powered assistants capable of making decisions—from surfacing insights to executing purchases—control over transactional data becomes essential. Basis Theory’s value proposition grows in lockstep with this trend: programmable payments, abstracted from rigid back-end dependencies, become a necessary layer for agent-led systems to function securely and efficiently.
At a time when trust in monolithic platforms is waning and demand for transparency is surging, Basis Theory is carving out a new role in the payments stack—not a middleman, but an enabler. One that gives merchants something they haven’t had in years: leverage.
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