Agents are on their way to becoming economic actors, yet every emerging protocol leaves identity and authorization unanswered. Soon, every institution accepting agent traffic will need to answer three questions: who authorized the agent, what is it permitted to do, and who is accountable when something goes wrong?
A credential is only as trustworthy as the verification underneath it, which is why players that stamp identity onto agents without owning that layer prove very little. As Beltic already owns the data, context, and engine that establish who a business or person is, the agent acting on their behalf can inherit that same verified trust, with no rebuild required.
The Road Ahead in the Agentic Commerce Era
Beltic sits at the intersection of two themes we’ve been building conviction around at Norwest: stablecoin infrastructure and agentic commerce. As stablecoin rails mature into the settlement layer for global commerce and agents begin transacting on behalf of businesses and people, every financial institution will need a trust layer underneath to verify and authorize those requests in real time. That layer doesn’t exist today in any defensible form, and we believe it’s the missing primitive that makes the whole system work at scale.
As agents begin transacting, every financial institution will need a trust layer to verify and authorize requests in real time. That layer doesn’t exist today in any defensible form, and we believe it’s the missing primitive that makes the whole system work at scale.
What Makes Beltic Uniquely Equipped to Build Trust Infrastructure? A Leadership Team Who Lived the Problem.
Infrastructure this comprehensive can only be built by people who have spent years inside the mess it untangles, and the more time we spent with Beltic’s co-founders Isha Bhatnagar and Mike Allan, the more convinced we became that they’re those people.
Building trust has been a throughline throughout Isha’s career. Before leading Beltic as CEO, Isha spent six years at Coinbase running product for its global regulatory experience, building the identity and onboarding infrastructure and bringing the company’s first institutional clients through the door. She is an operator who runs through brick walls, and someone who genuinely loves compliance.
While most treat it as a box to check on the way to something more glamorous, Isha went another route, earning the certifications to qualify as a CCO herself because she wanted to understand the work from the inside. That’s the kind of founder we look for, and the kind of credibility you can’t manufacture when the compliance team is sitting across the table.
She’s joined by Mike Allan, Beltic’s COO, who spent more than a decade building Atar, a banking-as-a-service platform he scaled through the maze of Brazil’s financial system before Porto Seguro acquired it in 2021. Mike spent years wrestling with the same fragmented verification friction from the operator’s seat, feeling firsthand how much the existing infrastructure holds a business back.
Rounding out the team is CTO Farhan Afsahi, who co-founded Verifiet, the data infrastructure platform Beltic acquired in 2025. By bringing Farhan – and the stack he built – in-house, Beltic is creating a verification engine designed natively for agents, rather than retrofitted for them.
What Makes Beltic’s Approach Different? Owning the Whole Verification Stack.
Beltic’s agent verification platform lets companies safely accept agents. They have developed a deep stack solution that combines principal-level verification with intent analysis, risk assessment, and policy matching. They provide the foundational signals necessary for autonomous, high-stakes transactions.
What makes Beltic different is that it owns every layer of the stack itself. Its source data comes from direct connections to global jurisdictions and 500 million entities, brought in-house through the 2025 acquisition of Verifiet, and the regulatory context and verification engine on top are built for real-time, programmatic response. AI native verification needs an AI native stack – not just pieces inserted or bolted into or on existing stacks.
AI native verification needs an AI native stack. What makes Beltic different is that it owns every layer of the stack itself.
Incumbents own real verification but they built it for human review, while orchestration tools just aggregate the fragmentation and leave the customer paying a compliance tax to every vendor underneath. Owning the data, context, and engine is what lets Beltic’s verifications be instant and defensible to a regulator in a way no one stitching vendors together can match.
Owning the data, context, and engine is what lets Beltic’s verifications be instant and defensible to a regulator in a way no one stitching vendors together can match.
We’re proud to partner at this early stage with Isha, Mike, and Farhan to lead their seed round. Together, they bring the domain depth, lived experience, and urgency this market demands.
As you start expanding your infrastructure to safely accept agents, the Beltic team would love to hear from you. And if building that future is the kind of problem you want to spend your time on, they’re growing the team! To talk about any of this, reach out to: Jordan Leites (LinkedIn or email) or Amalia Mackenzie (LinkedIn or email).
