Sardine, a California-based fraud and compliance tech provider for fintechs, has announced $19.5 million in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz, NYCA and Experian Ventures.
Sardine raises $19.5m in Series A funding round
As part of the deal, Angela Strange, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, joins Sardine’s board of directors.
Since its launch last spring, Sardine now claims over 50 customers, including neobanks (Brex and Chipper Cash), crypto exchanges (FTX, Luno and Bakkt), and NFT and crypto platforms (Abra, Transak, MoonPay and Candy Digital).
Matt Vega, Candy Digital’s head of fraud and risk, says he evaluated over ten “industry leading” providers in the fraud, risk, and know your customer (KYC) space to find “the ideal long-term strategic partner” for Candy Digital.
“Sardine was the only technology company that innovated all of the best-in-class technologies, features, systems, and engines that were critical for us, and that will now allow us to leverage one platform for all of our fraud, risk, KYC, and identity verification needs,” he states.
“Sardine outperforms the industry in almost every way, and I can say first-hand that Sardine would be my first recommendation for any company looking for an all-in-one world class fraud, risk, and KYC vendor.”
Sardine says the new funds will be used for further growth and product development as well as “hiring aggressively in the coming months”.
Additionally, the company has extended its fraud prevention platform to enable instant bank ACH transfers for crypto on-ramps. This, it says, removes the traditional three to seven day waiting period for consumers 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,” it claims.
The platform has already been proven to stop three times more fraud than legacy e-commerce fraud products, it adds.
Sardine’s platform was developed by a team of Coinbase, Revolut, Google Pay, Bolt and PayPal veterans.
“It’s an amazing time, as the very concept of money is being reinvented with the rise of fintech and crypto digital wallets,” says CEO and co-founder Soups Ranjan.
“Sardine has built a behaviour-based platform which uses tens of thousands of data points about a user’s behaviour 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,” Ranjan adds.
