Sardine Gets $51M for FinTech Fraud Prevention

Sardine, which provides fraud, compliance and instant settlement solutions, has gotten $51.5 million in Series B financing, which will go toward product development and marketing and sales worldwide, a press release said Tuesday (Sept. 20).

The company’s real-time fraud prevention products help FinTechs and decentralized finance (DeFi) companies obtain  faster user growth and higher authorization rates.

Sardine’s work combines traditional financial data sets such as bank account history, with identity, behavior and device intelligence, to enhance risk capabilities. It also makes use of know-your-customer (KYC), anti-money laundering (AML), sanctions and transaction monitoring to improve compliance during each stage of account opening and transactions.

The funding was led by Andreessen Horowitz. Customers include FTX and Blockchain.com.

“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.”

Sardine has also recently partnered with financial services organization Cross River Bank, a PYMNTS report said.

Read more: Cross River Bank Teams With Sardine on Crypto Payments Infrastructure

The partnership will give Sardine’s customers access to funds through the Cross River infrastructure platform.

The companies thought Sardine was “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 behavior patterns at the time of account origination and account funding.”

The company says it also monitors for fraud during account login, deposits and withdrawals, with customers able to integrate Sardine’s software development kit (SDK) into their web or mobile app.

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