Sardine Secures $70M Series C to Expand AI-Powered Fraud Detection Platform

Sardine raises $70m for AI fraud platform

Andreessen Horowitz, Nyca Partners, Google Ventures, Geodesic Capital, Cross Creek Capital, Moody's Analytics, Experian Ventures, and NAventures joined the round, which brings Sardine's total funding to $145 million. Developed by Coinbase, Revolut and PayPal veterans, Sardine's core AI platform uses device intelligence, behaviour biometrics, and machine learning to fraud in real time, streamline compliance, and unify data across risk teams. The firm has built a suite of intelligent agents for KYC onboarding, sanctions screening, merchant risk, and disputes that it says helps firms reduce manual workloads and cut costs. Last year, it achieved 130% year-on-year ARR growth and nearly doubled its customer base to more than 300 enterprises, including FIS, Ascensus, Deel, GoDaddy, and X. Soups Ranjan, CEO, Sardine, says: "Risk teams are stretched to their limits, and the workload keeps growing. Alert volumes have surged 800%, compliance hiring can't keep up, and analysts are stuck in an endless cycle of manual reviews. But it's not just the scale -- it's the nature of the work. Clearing transaction alerts, verifying onboarding cases, and investigating fraud rings are all highly repetitive yet mission critical tasks. "Sardine's AI agents automate the most time-consuming parts of risk operations, helping teams move faster, reduce false positives, and focus on stopping real threats. With this investment, we're scaling AI infrastructure to make risk teams more efficient and better equipped to combat the scale of modern financial crime."

Sardine Raises $70 Million to Build Fraud-Fighting AI Agents

Sardine, a risk platform tackling fraud, compliance and credit underwriting for enterprise clients, said it raised $70 million in equity funding that will be used to help expand the startup's suite of artificial intelligence agents targeting automated compliance and risk processes. The round, which the company says gives it a $660 million valuation, was led by Activant Capital with participation from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Nyca Partners, Google Ventures and Geodesic Capital. The additional funding brings Sardine's total capital raised to $145 million, the San Francisco-based company said.

Sardine Raises $70 Million to Expand AI Risk Platform | PYMNTS.com

Sardine raised $70 million in a Series C funding round to expand its artificial intelligence risk platform for fraud, compliance and credit underwriting. "This funding will accelerate our mission to rebuild trust in financial services," Sardine CEO Soups Ranjan said in a Tuesday (Feb. 11) blog post. "We're expanding our enterprise capabilities, growing globally and advancing our AI agent platform." Sardine uses device intelligence, behavior biometrics and machine learning to stop fraud in real time, streamline compliance and unify data across risk teams, according to a Tuesday press release. The company has profiled 2.2 billion devices. Its AI agents use these resources to automate tasks that are highly repetitive yet mission-critical, such as clearing transaction alerts, verifying onboarding cases and investigating fraud rings, per the release. By deploying these agents, financial institutions can scale their compliance efforts efficiently, reduce onboarding delays that can lead to lost customers, resolve alerts faster and mitigate the risk of lawsuits from customers who think they've been unfairly denied financial access, the release said. Sardine also announced in its Tuesday press release that it added four new AI agents, including a know your customer (KYC) onboarding agent that streamlines onboarding, a sanctions screening agent that helps teams review sanctions, a merchant risk agent that automates risk scoring and credit decisioning for merchants, and a disputes agent that handles the entire chargeback and dispute process. The company's latest funding round was led by Activant Capital. "We're doubling down on Sardine because they've built what the market desperately needs: the AI-first risk platform that gets smarter with every transaction," Andrew Steele, partner at Activant Capital, said in the release. "In an era where AI is supercharging financial crime, their ability to connect billions of data points across fraud, compliance and risk creates a massive advantage." Sardine's platform monitors user behavior and device information when they interact with a company's website or app, looking for red flags that might indicate fraud, such as unusual typing patterns, mismatched location information or the use of tools designed to hide a user's true identity, Ranjan told PYMNTS in an interview posted in October. "We like to say that there's never a single silver bullet," Ranjan said. "So, you have to have a variety of signals. However, what we at Sardine have found is that some of the best signals, which are indicators of fraud as well as authorized push payment scams, are actually device and behavior signals, which is what Sardine specializes in."

Fraud Detection Startup Sardine AI Wraps Up $70M Series C

AI-powered fraud detection platform Sardine locked up a $70 million Series C after nearly doubling its customer base last year. The new round was led by Activant Capital with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Nyca Partners, GV, Geodesic Capital, Cross Creek Capital, Moody's Analytics, Experian Ventures and NAventures. Founded in 2020, Sardine has raised $145 million, per the company. The San Francisco-based startup's AI-enhanced platform uses device intelligence, behavior biometrics and machine learning to help stop fraud in real time and streamlines compliance. The platform has a suite of AI agents designed to automate fraud and compliance operations and cut costs. In addition to growing its customer base, the company said it also grew annual recurring revenue 130% last year. "Risk teams are stretched to their limits, and the workload keeps growing," said Soups Ranjan, CEO of Sardine. "Alert volumes have surged 800%, compliance hiring can't keep up, and analysts are stuck in an endless cycle of manual reviews ... Sardine's AI agents automate the most time-consuming parts of risk operations, helping teams move faster, reduce false positives, and focus on stopping real threats." Despite the headlines fraud garners, investors have not poured money into fraud detection startups. In fact, Sardine's raise is the largest in the sector since Austin, Texas-based SpyCloud, which protects digital identities, closed a $110 million growth round of primary and secondary capital led by Riverwood Capital in August 2023. Venture funding actually dipped significantly in the space last year, with only $336 million going to fraud detection startups, per Crunchbase data. That dollar total was almost a 50% drop from the $620 million invested in 2023.