Karl Alomar

Karl Alomar is managing partner at M13, the venture firm with offices in New York, New York; San Francisco, California; and Los Angeles, California. He joined as a partner in 2019 after serving as COO of DigitalOcean, where he helped scale the company from early product through its NYSE IPO. Before that he co-founded and exited two technology companies as CEO. M13 lists his focus areas as AI infrastructure, fintech, and AI applications, and his portfolio credits include Prepared, Estuary, Teleskope, Makora, Baselayer, and Zenlytic.

Operator habits inside the firm

In an M13 interview he has argued that hype usually points at a real category shift, but that bidding wars where nobody looks closely are the failure mode to avoid. He prefers founders he can learn from as much as teach, and he has called hubris a hard red flag. On investing process he has said, "When investing, you have to let the founder lead the storyline, and either you believe in it or you don't."

From KYB tool to Know Your Agent

Alomar met Baselayer's CEO about a year before M13 led the company's $35 million Series A in September 2026. At first, he told Crunchbase News, the business "did not feel like a business of the future"—it looked like a banking Know Your Business verification product. His view changed as companies began letting AI agents make payments and Baselayer applied its business-identity network to verifying who deployed an agent and whether it may transact. "Every agent ultimately is going to have to be tied to something real," he said, arguing that identity will become one of the foundational layers of agentic commerce.