Basis Theory raises $33M to let merchants route payments across Stripe, Adyen, and Checkout.com simultaneously

Summary

Basis Theory sits in the payment stack before a transaction is routed, tokenizing card credentials and giving merchants real-time intelligence — card network, issuing bank, geography — so they can decide in the moment whether to send a payment to Stripe, Adyen, Checkout.com, or somewhere else. If the first processor declines, Basis Theory can reroute the transaction automatically. The pitch, in Colin Luce's framing, is that merchants running high-margin digital products would rather absorb some incremental fraud risk than lose the sale entirely.

The company just closed a $33M Series B led by Costanoa Ventures, with Bessemer Venture Partners participating. Bessemer led the Series A in 2021. Luce says the Costanoa relationship dates to the seed round, where the two sides didn't end up doing a deal — Costanoa came back in for the B.

The competitive argument

Luce pushes back hard on the narrative that Stripe has locked up agentic commerce. He argues Stripe and Adyen combined still hold less than 10% of US acquiring volume, leaving the large majority on legacy processors. His read is that Stripe hasn't finished winning US acquiring, let alone the broader market, and that Stripe's agentic demos look clean inside the Stripe ecosystem but get complicated the moment a merchant steps outside it.

The data portability point is where the leverage lives. Card credentials stored exclusively with a processor give that processor structural pricing power. Once a merchant takes back control of that data — storing tokens themselves via Basis Theory — they can credibly threaten to move volume and negotiate accordingly. Luce uses Comcast as the analogy: the 50% discount only appears when the customer says they're leaving.

Basis Theory is fully remote, a product of its 2020 founding, and operates out of investors' San Francisco offices one day a week.