Sardine closes $19.5m in Series A funding round

By Edlyn Cardoza

Sardine, the fraud and compliance platform for FinTechs, recently announced $19.5 million in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz, NYCA, and Experian Ventures to enable companies to protect customers from financial fraud. Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Angela Strange joins XYZ’s Ross Fubini on the Sardine board of directors. Funding comes amid strong growth and company momentum. Since its launch last Spring, Sardine now powers over 50 customers, including some of the largest neobanks (Brex and Chipper Cash), fast-growing crypto exchanges (FTX, Luno, and Bakkt), and global NFT and crypto platforms (Abra, Transak, MoonPay, and Candy Digital). Funds will be used for continued growth and further product development, and hiring aggressively in the coming months.

Additionally, the company announced that it has extended its industry-leading fraud prevention platform to enable instant bank ACH transfers for crypto on-ramps. This removes consumers’ traditional 3-7 day waiting period before they gain access to their funds, while Sardine assumes all fraud, regulatory compliance, and legal risks. By providing the industry’s most comprehensive fraud prevention in one API, Sardine delivers the fastest and safest way to on-ramp crypto.

Sardine’s platform, developed by a team of Coinbase, Revolut, Google Pay, Bolt, and PayPal veterans who uniquely understand the pain and expenses associated with FinTech fraud, has already been proven to stop 3x more fraud than legacy e-commerce fraud products. Sardine is uniquely suited to provide Instant ACH transfers based on its core technology, which uses AI to provide a real-time fraud score based on the user’s identity, device, and behaviour patterns at the time of account origination and account funding. It also continuously monitors fraud during account login, deposits, and withdrawals. Customers integrate Sardine’s SDK into their web or mobile apps, and Sardine handles the rest.

“It’s an amazing time, as the very concept of money is being reinvented with the rise of fintech and crypto digital wallets,” said Soups Ranjan, CEO and co-founder of Sardine. “However, it is still a very frustrating experience for customers that expect to instantly move money from legacy banks into their new fintech, crypto, DeFi, or NFT wallets. It is incredibly hard to establish trust in whether someone is using their own bank account to load money into a wallet or a stolen one. Sardine has built a behavior-based platform which uses tens of thousands of data points about a user’s behavior and combines that with dozens of data sources, ranging from phone and email to social media and blockchain analytics, to establish a real-time trust score,” he added. “Today, we can eliminate all of the complexity associated with payment fraud by offering indemnification against fraud losses during money load events.”

“Our investment in Sardine is perfectly aligned to Experian’s fraud capabilities and our work to stop fraud in digital commerce and payments,” said Kathleen Peters, Chief Innovation Officer, Experian Decision Analytics in North America. “Sardine is on the path to being a market leader in preventing financial crime with their talented team and innovative products. Experian is always looking for new investments and partners that can bring groundbreaking technology and problem-solving solutions to the market.”