Compliance Platform Sardine Closes $19.5M Funding Round to Eliminate Fishy Crypto Transactions

Sardine, a fraud and compliance platform for fintechs, raised $19.5 million in a Series A round that included Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), NYCA and Experian Ventures, the company announced Thursday.

The capital will be used for product development and hiring aggressively in the coming months.

As part of the investment, a16z General Partner Angela Strange will join the Sardine board of directors.

San Francisco-based Sardine uses artificial intelligence to provide a real-time fraud score based on a user’s identity, device and behavior patterns at the time of account origination and account funding. The platform checks for fraud during each login, deposit and withdrawal.

The Sardine platform has now added instant bank Automated Clearing House (ACH) transfers for crypto on-ramps, removing the traditional three to seven-day waiting period for consumers to gain access to their funds. Sardine assumes the fraud, regulatory compliance and legal risks of the ACH transactions.

Sardine launched last spring and has since grown to over 50 customers, including neobank Brex, crypto exchanges FTX and Bakkt and crypto platforms MoonPay and Candy Digital.

Sardine CEO Soups Ranjan previously ran data science and risk at Coinbase. The Sardine team also includes veterans of Google Pay, Revolut, Bolt and PayPal.

“Every company with a payments component faces the same problem: the momentum-killing wait time between when the customer transfers money to your platform and when they can actually use that money on your service to transact,” said a16z’s Strange in the press release. “Sardine solves this issue in order to keep financial transactions moving for the good of all. Its value proposition becomes even clearer when you consider that every company is rapidly becoming a fintech company.”