Sardine: More Money, Less Problems – Faster Transactions with Next Generation Fraud Tools

The life of a company is often defined by the stage of its growth. As a company hits a new inflection point, fresh capital, new partners, and speed help to fully capture this new opportunity. 

When we first met Soups and his co-founders at Sardine, they had a unique view of a fraud product that was missing in the market. The clarity of their vision gave us confidence that they could find the best companies, sign them as customers, and bring a transformative product to life. When Angela Strange and the A16Z team invested last year, Sardine was at an early inflection point, scaling into the market with a fraud solution that was both unique in construction and dominant compared to its competitors. 

This week, Sardine announced that we’re pulling more of the A16Z team onto the active roster, with Alex Immerman and the growth team getting involved with a few more dollars.

At this stage, Sardine continues working with the best customers to provide new-age fraud and payment infrastructure. At the heart of the device intelligence platform is an AI and risk engine that powers a fully customizable fraud and compliance system, purpose-built to the needs of modern fintech. Sardine has become the solution for companies whose core business is centered around high-volume digital payments. Their ability to reduce system-compromising events brings them one step closer to unlocking risk-free, real-time transaction volume for their customers. 

Sardine’s core IP, and its initial wedge, is the fraud & compliance engine, which is becoming the go-to solution for fintech and crypto. As we’ve said in the past, “every company ultimately will have to become some form of a fintech” and crypto is slowly working its way into that equation. It became clear to us very early on that if you figure out fraud, you figure out payments and growth. Tackling high fraud losses, and all of the downstream consequences (card declines, account closure, payment volume reduction) is the key to unlocking real upside. It’s this truly symbiotic relationship between fraud and financial services that has allowed Sardine to build a deeper relationship with its customers, and a more magical experience for their users. We’ve already seen them help companies like FTX, Blockchain.com, Brave, and Wealthsimple make their own customer experience better.

Payments are an excellent gateway to creating a high-quality customer experience and they’re better when they’re instant. Sardine’s vision is a world where all payments are instant and it starts with understanding risk and getting ahead of it. Whether it’s a reduction in APP fraudulent transactions or increases in daily transaction volume limits, there is an unprecedented chance to create industry-level changes by building on a very strong, new foundation. Sardine has an opportunity to ultimately touch, and secure, a piece of every transaction that its customers see. As exemplified by the pull for their instant ACH → Crypto on-ramp product, Sardine is able to insert themselves into their customers’ payments flow and detect fraudulent signals, while also capturing margin on transaction volume. When you spend as much time in Fintech as we do, it becomes very clear just how advantageous this model is, not only for Fintechs & Traditional Financial institutions but particularly for Web3 & DeFi as well. 

Sardine has demonstrated the ability to find a massive business in fraud and compliance, enabling safer, faster payments for fintech and crypto. Their obsession with customer pain is reflected in their product architecture, where they’ve designed flexibility into their core system, thus enabling them to scale up and evolve alongside the hyper-growth customers that they serve. This year alone, they’ve doubled their customer base to reach 125+ clients and launched their crypto and NFT onramp products. 

We’re excited to be concentrating even more dollars into Sardine’s Series B financing alongside our dear friend, Alex Immerman, at Andreessen Horowitz Growth! The road ahead is long and there’s still much to be built, but together we’ll go further to make payments safer, and transactions faster, and upgrade this industry for the better. 

#WeCan