Jonathan Awad is the Co-Founder and CEO of Baselayer, the premier AI platform for business risk assessment, KYB, and B2B fraud prevention, serving over 2,200 companies across banking, payments, and lending.

Jonathan holds a BS in Economics and Political Philosophy from Skidmore College and built his career in investment banking at J.P. Morgan, UBS, and Lazard before leading growth and product at Middesk from 2021 to 2023.

Jonathan identified a critical gap in how financial institutions assess small and medium businesses, driving him to co-found Baselayer in 2023 with a vision to eliminate the thin-file problem for SMBs at scale.

Prior to Baselayer, Jonathan served as an investor at OakNorth and LEX, and is an active angel investor and startup advisor across fintech and AI.

Baselayer has scaled to serve over 2,000 banking, lending, and government clients, integrating its APIs into platforms managing more than 30 million accounts, and raised $6.5M in a 5x oversubscribed seed round.