Sardine

Founded by Revolut veterans, Soups Ranjan, Aditya Goel, and Zahid Shaikh, Sardine offers a fraud prevention-as-a-service and compliance API and SDK-based solution for financial institutions, primarily targeting neobanks and digital wallets, to detect financial crimes in account opening, funding, and payments. Sardine assigns a risk score to the card or bank accounts when customers move money into their digital wallets (including crypto, DeFi, and NFT wallets) from their credit and debit cards, or through ACH transfers. Users can reportedly build fraud prevention solutions in less than two weeks using the platform.

Sardine looks to combat fraud by analyzing user behaviors and combining the behavior with several data sources (ranging from phone and email to social media and blockchain analytics), in place of shopping cart or shipping address analytics, commonly used by ecommerce fraud prevention platforms. Accordingly, it also claims that the platform has been proven to prevent 3x more fraud than legacy ecommerce products. Sardine offers a range of fraud prevention solutions, including foundational fraud scores, KYC, account takeover prevention, and continuous transaction monitoring, among others.

In February 2022, the company expanded its platform to include an instant bank ACH transfer for crypto on-ramps, which removes the waiting period (typically 3 to 7 days) for consumers to access their funds.

Key customers and partnerships

The platform was used by over 130 firms as of September 2022, including neobanks (Brex and Chipper Cash), crypto exchanges (FTX, Luno, and Bakkt, as well as NFT and crypto platforms (Abra, Transak, and MoonPay). Sardine’s users are reportedly based across the globe, including in the US, Japan, and Russia.

In September 2023, Sardine partnered with Incode Technologies to offer face and behavioral biometric authentication solutions for FinTech firm Marygold & Co. Together, they aim to offer solutions for the know-your-customer (KYC) onboarding process, and Marygold customers will also gain access to Sardine's behavioral biometrics technology, along with its fraud prevention and anti-money laundering (AML) capabilities.

Funding and financials

Sardine raised USD 51.5 million in Series B funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz, in September 2022, to invest in product development, marketing, and sales. This was the company’s second funding round for the year, after it raised USD 19.5 million in Series A funding in February.