Sardine nets $70M in Series C funding for automated fraud prevention platform

Sardine, a startup that employs machine learning for fraud prevention, compliance and credit underwriting, has announced a $70 million Series C funding round led by Activant Capital. The company’s total capital raised now stands at $145 million.

A release says that in 2024, Sardine achieved 130 percent year-over-year annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth and nearly doubled its customer base, as it surpassed 2.2 billion devices profiled. Its customer base now includes more than 300 enterprises, including FIS, Ascensus, Deel, GoDaddy and X.

Soups Ranjan, CEO of Sardine, says “risk teams are stretched to their limits, alert volumes have surged 800 percent, compliance hiring can’t keep up, and analysts are stuck in an endless cycle of manual reviews.” Noise and surface threats pile up, obscuring the genuine threats.

Noting both the tedium and dire necessity of tasks like clearing transaction alerts, verifying onboarding cases and investigating fraud rings, Ranjan says Sardine’s AI agents ease the burden by automating the more time-consuming aspects of risk operations and fraud prevention.

“KYC may be easy, but edge cases are hard,” says Ranjan, who has done stints at Coinbase and Revolut. “Names appear in different orders across cultures, date formats vary, and small mismatches stack up in alert queues. Most fraud alerts fall into a grey area, forcing analysts to spend 25 minutes or more tracing transaction history, mapping relationships and verifying location data. When teams are dealing with dozens or even hundreds of alerts per day, the backlog becomes unmanageable.”

Ranjan says that Sardine applies device intelligence, behavioral biometrics and machine learning to automate the heavy lifting, “surfacing connections and summarizing risk signals so teams can move faster and focus on making the right call.”

Investment to fund agents for KYC onboarding, sanctions screening, risk, disputes

The funding round includes participation from both new and existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Nyca Partners, Google Ventures, Geodesic Capital, Cross Creek Capital, Moody’s Analytics, Experian Ventures and NAventures.

It targets four key advancement areas to benefit from its algorithmic agents: KYC onboarding to weed out edge cases; sanctions screening that “learns your standard operating procedures (SOP), provides detailed audit logs, and supports decision validation”; merchant risk, via automated risk scoring and credit decisioning; and disputes, for which agents handle “the entire chargeback and dispute process, from gathering data to preparing evidence packages.”

Arjun Ramakrishnan, head of risk for GoDaddy Payments, says “Sardine’s platform is now the core of our risk and fraud workflows, allowing us to consolidate vendors and improve operational efficiency.”

Arvind Ayyala, a partner at Geodesic Capital, says “Soups and his team bring decades of expertise, transforming legacy workflows into best-in-class infrastructure that reduces costs, increases efficiency, and ensures the highest level of risk performance. Geodesic Capital is proud to support Sardine in this next phase of growth.”

Article Topics

behavioral biometrics  |  biometrics  |  fraud prevention  |  funding  |  investment  |  KYC  |  onboarding  |  Sardine