San Francisco-headquartered Sardine announced that it has raised $51.5 million in a Series B round, in its pursuit of providing fraud, compliance, and instant settlement solutions to fintech and web3 players across the globe. The Series B round was led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z) Growth Fund, and included the participation of new and existing investors alike.
This list includes 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. According to the startup, the proceeds from the current round of funding will be deployed towards accelerating the development of its products, as well as sales and marketing efforts across the globe.
“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.”
“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.”
The current bout of funding succeeds the Series A round earlier this year, when Sardine scooped up $19.5 million in a Series A funding round from a16z and others. Since then, it has clocked a steady growth over the months, and today, its customers include high-profile names such as FTX and Blockchain.com, as well as fintech players such as Wealthsimple and Digit.
At a time when everything is going digital and the importance of fintechs have never been more, concerns and fears about online fraud are at a high. Soups Ranjan, co-founder and CEO of Sardine, admitted as such, saying that faster instant payments mean faster fraud. This leads to greater vulnerability of consumers to social engineering attacks, which in turn leads to a need for real-time fraud prevention products.
This is where Sardine comes in – it leverages its fraud and compliance platform to help finechs and DeFi companies obtain faster user growth and higher authorization rates. It combines traditional financial data sets, like bank account history, with identity, behavior and device intelligence to enhance the risk capabilities of customers, helping them reduce more fraud with fewer false positives.
Its other offerings include an instant ACH and card on-ramp to crypto, enabling its customers in the fintech and crypto markets to instantly purchase over 30 different crypto assets or NFTs, along with KYC, AML, sanctions, and transaction monitoring to reduce fraud during account opening, account funding, and ongoing transactions.
