Following a massive shift to mobile-first and digital-only banks, both legacy and digital bank account holders find themselves increasingly at risk for fraud. Sardine is on a mission to simplify fraud operations for fintech companies and their users. Now, the SF-based company is receiving a fresh injection of capital to keep things swimming along.
Sardine announced Thursday that it raised $19.5 million in a Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company has done quite well for itself since its launch last spring. Its fraud and compliance tech is already in use at over 50 companies, including fintech giants like Brex and Chipper Cash.
Sardine’s AI-led platform provides users with real-time fraud scores based on their identity, device and behavioral patterns from the very moment they open their account.
“It’s an amazing time, as the very concept of money is being reinvented with the rise of fintech and crypto digital wallets,” Soups Ranjan, co-founder and CEO of Sardine, said in a statement. “However, it is still a very frustrating experience for customers that expect to instantly move money from legacy banks into their new fintech, crypto, DeFi or NFT wallets.”
On the bank’s side, Ranjan says, it’s become incredibly hard to establish trust in whether someone is using their own account to load money into a digital wallet or a stolen one.
To counter this, Sardine’s behavior-based platform references thousands of data points about a user’s behavior and compares them with dozens of direct sources. These sources range from phone and email correspondence to social media and blockchain analytics. The company keeps its eyes on just about everything in order to establish a real-time trust score for its clients.
“Today, we can eliminate all of the complexity associated with payment fraud by offering indemnification against fraud losses during money load events,” Ranjan said.
In addition to the funding, the company also announced the introduction of a new feature that will enable instant bank transfers for crypto on-ramps. Sardine assumes all fraud, compliance and legal risks and in turn, consumers get to bypass the traditional three- to seven-day transfer period.
As the company works to expand its market reach, it also plans to increase its headcount. Sardine is now hiring for over 20 roles spanning its product, operations and engineering teams, to name a few.
Additional investors NYCA and Experian Ventures participated in the round.
