Sardine, a fintech company preventing payment fraud, announced Tuesday it raised a $51.5 million Series B funding round from Andreessen Horowitz.
With the speed at which transactions happen today, fraud prevention has to be just as fast. Sardine helps customers reduce fraud with real-time prevention products that lead to fewer false positives, faster user growth and higher authorization rates.
The company does this by combining traditional financial data sets with identity, behavior and device intelligence. Sardine also offers capabilities like Know Your Customer, Anti-Money Laundering and sanctions and transaction monitoring to reduce fraudulent activity as well as instant settlement options for crypto transactions.
Sardine’s solution is now more important than ever with the rate of fraud attacks skyrocketing in recent years. According to a 2022 report by cybersecurity company Sift, payment fraud attacks in the fintech industry increased 70 percent last year. More troubling, only 21 percent of fraud victims were notified of suspicious activity.
“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,” Sardine CEO Soups Ranjan said in a statement. “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 plans to use its new funds for product development and marketing and sales expansion. The Series B round also included investment from XYZ, Nyca Partners, Sound Ventures, Activant Capital, Visa, Google Ventures, Eric Schmidt, Vikram Pandit and the General Partnership, among many others.
Sardine continues to grow its team, actively hiring across engineering, product, customer success, sales and operations departments.
