Portrait No. 001
Isha Bhatnagar
Co-founder & CEO
Beltic
Raised — Pre-seed; About to raise Seed
I spent years at Coinbase building identity infrastructure for 50 million+ customers and onboarding the first institutional clients. I watched fraud happen in real time, and watched the industry respond with tools that were slow, manual, and built for a world that no longer exists. I also noticed something else: hardly any women were building a technology or infrastructure company. I am now the co-founder and CEO at Beltic to build the trust infrastructure that the agentic economy needs. This is the layer that verifies who a person is, who a business is, and now, who an AI agent is and who authorized it to act. The timing is not accidental. AI agents are about to operate at scale in real systems. The identity layer underneath them needs to exist. We’re building it.
In her words
“Watch Me Tilt The World: The next economy will run on agents. I'm building the proof that they can be trusted.”
Chapter I
The toughest challenges you've faced as a founder.
Well, I never thought being a founder was for me. Never dreamt of it. I always say the idea found me and then I was brave enough to embrace it. For a while, Impostor syndrome was real. So was the work. I chose to focus on the latter. I made progress every day. I chose not to give up! I am a mom of two - not only did I start my company but got a masters degree from Oxford at the same time. I want my kids to feel it’s never too late to seek education or experience. And also that their mom is a badass! Today Beltic is VC-backed pre-seed company converting nearly 8 in 10 pilots to paid contracts, with enterprise customers. The barriers I faced were not dramatic. They were cumulative; rooms where I was the only woman, pitches where the pattern matching worked against me, a technical domain where being taken seriously required twice the proof. I navigated all of it by staying close to the problem and letting the product speak.
Chapter II
Your vision.
I am obsessed with making the identity and compliance layer programmable - I want it automated and instant and fraud free! Every AI agent acting in the world today is unaccountable. It has no verified identity, no auditable authorization, no way for the system it’s entering to know who sent it or whether it should be trusted. That’s the problem I’m obsessed with. Beltic is building the identity and credentialing layer for AI agents so that when an agent shows up to move money, access a system, or execute a decision, the answer to “who vouches for this?” is cryptographic, auditable, and instant. The change this enables is straightforward: enterprises can finally deploy agents in production without blind trust. Fraud becomes traceable. Accountability is built in from the start. We’re not building the agents. We’re building what makes them safe to use at scale. That infrastructure doesn’t exist yet. I am building it!
Chapter III
The impact you want to leave behind — for your industry, your community, and the women who come next.
Fraud is a tax on people who can least afford it. I watched it happen at scale at Coinbase - real losses, real consequences, infrastructure too slow and too broken to stop it. I’m building Beltic because accountability should be automatic. Every agent, every transaction, every decision - cryptographically linked to a real, verified owner. But the longer vision is bigger than the product. I believe the next generation of women who secure the internet should meet technology at 14, not 24. The pipeline breaks early and that’s where I intend to intervene. Modeled on what Girls Who Code and Black Girls Code started, I want to build curated technical internships for girls between 14 and 17. Get them inside real companies, working on real problems, early enough that it feels like home. Trust infrastructure for the world. And a model for women who’ll build what comes next.