BASIS THEORY
Built to Keep Customers Transacting

What Basis Theory Actually Does

Strip away the jargon and the pitch is simple: don't let any one payment processor hold your customers' card data hostage.

Every online business that accepts payments faces the same quiet problem. The moment a customer's card number touches your servers, you inherit a slice of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard - a sprawling compliance regime that can take months to satisfy and years to maintain. Most companies solve this by outsourcing the problem entirely to whichever payment processor they signed with first, which works fine until that processor raises prices, drops a market, or simply can't do what the business needs next.

Basis Theory sells a different answer: a cloud-native, PCI Level 1-compliant vault that sits between a merchant and its payment processors. Instead of a business storing raw card numbers, it sends that data to Basis Theory's vault, gets back a token - a stand-in value with no exploitable value on its own - and uses that token everywhere a card number would normally go. The underlying data never has to leave the vault. It can be routed to any processor the merchant chooses, swapped later, or split across several at once.

The company describes itself now as "built to keep customers transacting" - a tagline aimed less at the vault itself and more at what happens when a payment fails. Smart retry logic, backup routing to a second processor, and automatic card-on-file updates are all sold as ways to keep a subscription from silently lapsing because a card expired or a processor had a bad day.

Three People Who Had Already Felt This Pain

Colin Luce, Brian Billingsley, and Ben Milne didn't arrive at payment vaults from a market study. They arrived from having built payment companies before.

The trio's prior stops read like a checklist of the industry's plumbing problems: Yodlee, an early data-aggregation company that had to move sensitive financial data between institutions; Dwolla, a payments network built to move money outside the traditional card rails; and Klarna, the buy-now-pay-later giant operating at a scale where every compliance shortcut becomes a liability. Basis Theory, founded in 2020, is what happens when people who spent years building payment products decide the actual bottleneck was never the product - it was the data underneath it.

Who Uses a Payment Vault, and Why

Basis Theory's customers cluster around businesses that either move a lot of payment volume, operate across multiple markets, or can't afford a compliance misstep - digital health platforms handling medical billing, subscription businesses fighting failed-payment churn, remittance companies moving money across borders, and e-commerce platforms that need to route around a processor outage without customers noticing. Named customers include Pinterest, Melio, and MoneyGram.

One customer testimonial, cited on the company's site, put it plainly: "Basis Theory made us PCI compliant in a day, rather than months." Another, from Marble's head of revenue Matt Donofrio, pointed to the same theme - fast implementation without giving up flexibility later.

Where It Sits, and Who Else Is There

Basis Theory is not the only company selling a "neutral" payment vault. It competes with VGS (Very Good Security), Skyflow, and Lithic, along with the in-house tokenization tools that large PSPs build to keep merchants from leaving.

Its differentiator, at least as the company tells it, is neutrality by design: because Basis Theory doesn't process payments itself, it has no incentive to steer merchants toward one processor over another. That's a harder story for a payment processor's own vault to tell, since staying "sticky" with merchant data is often the point.

Basis Theory operates as an API-first SaaS platform, charging merchants and platforms for vault usage, tokenization volume, and routing services rather than taking a cut of transaction value the way a traditional processor does. That keeps its incentives aligned with keeping merchants' options open rather than closed.

Agentic Commerce, and a $33 Million Round

In October 2025, Basis Theory closed a $33 million Series B led by Costanoa Ventures, with Stage 2 Capital and Moneta VC joining existing backers Bessemer Venture Partners, Kindred Ventures, Box Group, and Offline Ventures.

The round's stated purpose is a bet that AI agents will increasingly initiate purchases on a person's behalf - booking travel, reordering supplies, comparing prices - without a human clicking "buy" at the moment of purchase. Today's payment systems largely assume a human is present at checkout; Basis Theory's argument is that the vault model, where payment data is tokenized and permissioned rather than freely handed around, is a natural fit for agents that need controlled, auditable access to a customer's payment method.

The company also leads the Agentic Commerce Consortium, a group of more than 20 companies working on shared standards for how AI agents should be allowed to transact. Standards efforts rarely make headlines on their own, but they tend to shape who gets to build on top of a market early - and who has to catch up later.

From Founding to Series B

Common Questions