Sardine, a company that provides real-time fraud prevention, raises $51.5M Series B from new and existing investors, including Visa, Google Ventures, and ING Ventures

Funds will be used to accelerate development of Sardine’s fraud and compliance platform as well as its card and instant ACH to crypto on-ramp & NFT checkout products.

As a leading provider of fraud, compliance, and instant settlement solutions, Sardine announced today $51.5M in Series B financing to accelerate product development as well as marketing and sales across the globe. Andreessen Horowitz’s Growth Fund led the round with participation from new and existing investors, including Visa, Google Ventures, and ING Ventures.

“We believe Sardine is a key payments infrastructure provider across traditional and decentralized finance, and we’re proud to continue to support this team on their next stage of growth,” said Alex Immerman, partner on the a16z Growth Fund. “Sardine’s fraud-fighting technology helps move money fast and without risk, and their rapid growth is a testament to the criticality and strength of their offering.”

Sardine’s real-time fraud prevention products help customers reduce more fraud with fewer false positives, leading to faster user growth and higher authorization rates. Sardine combines traditional financial data sets, like bank account history, with identity, behavior and device intelligence to significantly enhance their customers’ risk capabilities. Sardine also offers KYC, AML, sanctions, and transaction monitoring to reduce fraud during account opening, account funding, and ongoing transactions. These added features are essential now as payment fraud in fintech ballooned 70% in 2021.

“Faster payments means faster fraud. As Zelle, RTP and FedNow become increasingly popular, consumers are increasingly vulnerable to social engineering attacks where they are convinced to buy something that never arrives or invest in a scam,” said Soups Ranjan, CEO of Sardine. “Secondly, Financial Institutions only know that their customers bought ETH or USDC, not what they do with it afterwards. What is needed is a new way of looking at fraud prevention, one which deeply inspects user behavior at the time of purchase, and combines it with what happens to the funds downstream. That’s exactly what we built at Sardine.”

“Digital assets are creating the future of our financial system – but they require a strong fraud and compliance infrastructure to protect investors. Sardine does precisely this,” said Alfarida Mohammed, Senior Vice President of Compliance at FTX. “Sardine’s expertise and leading fraud-fighting technology ensure that our crypto users enjoy a seamless and safe experience while trading with FTX.”

“It’s shocking that crypto grew to over $3 trillion of market cap last year with such a terrible user experience. Solving onboarding is the biggest unlock the crypto industry has for continued adoption. It needs to be simple, trusted, and safe for both merchants and consumers,” said Maaria Bajwa, at Sound Ventures. “This means making it very easy to move money from fiat to cryptocurrency, and to use that cryptocurrency across applications. Sardine has deep expertise in both fraud and KYC to streamline this entire process.”

Leveraging its industry-leading fraud and compliance platform, Sardine is changing how companies can move money through its Instant Settlement offering. Sardine offers an instant ACH and card on-ramp to crypto, enabling its fintech and crypto customers to instantly purchase over 30 different crypto assets or NFTs. Sardine recently launched their direct fiat to NFT checkout product and their first partner was Autograph for their Tom Brady’s Signature Experience NFT launch.

“We are excited to offer instant ACH settlement, once thought to be impossible because the fraud risk was too high,” said Aditya Goel, Co-Founder of Sardine. “Not only does Sardine take on 100% of all the fraud, compliance, and liability associated with instant money movement, but we also offer higher limits than would be available via card payments. We want people to move money online confidently, and this product is critical for payment companies who want to offer a great user experience.”

“Unlocking instant payments is a massive but elusive opportunity. It’s a risk problem, but typically fraud, identity, and payments have been siloed,” said Andrew Steele, Partner at Activant Capital. “Sardine is a rare example of both a platform and a multi-disciplinary team that combines all three in a model at scale already. As they unlock instant payments across fintech and crypto, they’re uniquely positioned to build a leading payments network of the future.”

Sardine is led by industry experts who have scaled fraud, compliance, and payments infrastructure across companies like Coinbase, Revolut, Uber, PayPal & Zelle. In addition, Sardine was recently added to the Breakout List and named one of the top high-growth startups in the United States. With over 135 customers, and growing fast, the company is actively hiring for roles across Engineering, Product, Customer Success, Sales, and Operations.