People

Jonathan Awad

Jonathan Awad is a co-founder at Baselayer [1], a platform focused on business identity and risk management in the artificial intelligence sector located in New York City. Baselayer operates within the New York AI business ecosystem, addressing identity and risk-related challenges for organizations in the technology sector.

Founded

Insights & ideas

Jonathan Awad argues that AI has fundamentally lowered the barrier to creating both legitimate and fraudulent businesses, framing LLC formation as something that will soon be as common and easy as opening a bank account, which is exactly what makes it exploitable by bad actors [1]. As CEO of Baselayer, he describes the company's role as helping over 2,000 financial institutions distinguish real businesses from fake ones so they can onboard good actors quickly while pausing or declining fraudulent applicants, using a mix of government data, online data, and proprietary databases to connect individuals to the businesses they claim to represent [1].

A recurring theme in his thinking is that linking a person to a business is the easier part of the problem; the harder and more urgent challenge is verifying that the actual person behind an application is the one truly applying and performing the business activity in real time, rather than a synthetic identity or someone impersonating a legitimate applicant [1].

Education

Media & appearances

In the news

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