Sardine, the fraud and compliance platform for Fintech firms, completed a $19.5 million in Series A round from Andreessen Horowitz, NYCA, and Experian Ventures “to enable companies to protect customers from financial fraud.”
As mentioned in the update, Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Angela Strange joins XYZ’s Ross Fubini on the Sardine board of directors. Funding comes amid steady growth and company momentum. Since its launch last Spring, Sardine now powers more than 50 clients ,including some of the biggest neobanks (Brex and Chipper Cash), major crypto exchanges (FTX, Luno, and Bakkt), and established NFT and crypto platforms (Abra, Transak, MoonPay, and Candy Digital). Funds will be channeled towards ongoing growth, as well as to enhance product development and hiring more professionals during the next few months.
The firm also revealed that it extended its fraud prevention platform to now enable instant bank ACH transfers for crypto on-ramps. This “removes the traditional 3-7 day waiting period for consumers before they gain access to their funds while Sardine assumes all fraud, regulatory compliance, and legal risks.” By offering one of the industry’s most extensive fraud prevention in one API, Sardine claims to offer one of the fastest and safest way to on-ramp crypto.
Sardine’s platform, implemented by a team of Coinbase, Revolut, Google Pay, Bolt, and PayPal professionals who really understand the pain and costs associated with fintech fraud, has “proven to stop 3x more fraud than legacy e-commerce fraud products.”
Sardine is well-suited to offer 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 behavior patterns at the time of account origination and account funding.” It also continuously “monitors for fraud during account login, deposits, and withdrawals.” Clients just need to “integrate Sardine’s SDK into their web or mobile apps, and Sardine handles the rest.”
Soups Ranjan, CEO and co-founder of Sardine, stated:
“It’s an amazing time, as the very concept of money is being reinvented with the rise of fintech and crypto digital wallets. 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.”
Kathleen Peters, Chief Innovation Officer, Experian Decision Analytics in North America, said:
“Our investment in Sardine is perfectly aligned to Experian’s fraud capabilities and our work to stop fraud in digital commerce and payments. 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.”
Andreessen Horowitz’s Angela Strange, added:
“Every company with a payments component faces the same problem: the momentum-killing wait time between when the customer transfers money to your platform and when they can actually use that money on your service to transact. Sardine solves this issue in order to keep financial transactions moving for the good of all. Its value proposition becomes even clearer when you consider that every company is rapidly becoming a fintech company.”
For more details on the announcement, check here.
