Fraud prevention and compliance fintech Sardine nets $51.5m Series B

Sardine, a fraud prevention and compliance infrastructure fintech, has raised $51.5 million in a Series B round led by Andreesen Horowitz.

Sardine raises $51.5m

A number of new and existing investors also participated, including XYZ, Nyca Partners, Sound Ventures, Activant Capital, Visa, Google Ventures, Eric Schmidt, Vikram Pandit, The General Partnership, NAventures, ING Ventures, ConsenSys, Cross River Digital Ventures, Alloy Labs and Uniswap Labs Ventures.

Sardine claims its real-time fraud prevention products help reduce false positives leading to faster user growth and higher authorisation rates.

It combines traditional financial data sets such as bank account history with identity, behaviour and device intelligence to enhance their customers’ risk capabilities. Sardine says it offers KYC, AML, sanctions and transaction monitoring to reduce fraud during account opening, account funding and ongoing transactions. The company also offers instant settlement for crypto and NFT transactions.

The new funds will be used to accelerate development of Sardine’s fraud and compliance platform as well as the growth of its recently launched direct fiat to NFT checkout product.

“Faster payments means faster fraud,” says Soups Ranjan, CEO of Sardine, adding that consumers are “increasingly vulnerable to social engineering attacks where they are convinced to buy something that never arrives or invest in a scam”.

“What is needed is a new way of looking at fraud prevention, one which deeply inspects user behaviour at the time of purchase and combines it with what happens to the funds downstream.”

Founded in 2020 and based in San Francisco, Sardine raised $19.5 million in a Series A round held in February this year. Some of the start-up’s clients include FTX, Blockchain.com, WealthSimple, Brave and Digit.