Announcing our Series-A led by Andreessen Horowitz

At the end of 2018, there were roughly 5,000 fintech startups operating around the globe. At the start of 2022, there are well over 25,000 of them. To say that it’s an exciting time to be in fintech is an understatement. Consumers now have more influence on their own financial outcomes while borders have transformed from potential obstacles into opportunities to transform finance.

At Sardine, we’re very familiar with the inherent tension hidden beneath this explosive growth. Customers hate waiting for their own money to appear in their new favorite financial app. Of course, fintechs hate it too, but because billions of dollars are lost to fraud every year, they need to be extra wary. This is why we started Sardine — to remove the delays and risks associated with the movement of money between traditional banks and cards into crypto and digital wallets.

Today, Sardine is proud to announce that we have raised $19.5 million in Series-A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by NYCA and Experian Ventures and over 30 angel investors who are seasoned operators in fintech and crypto. We are also grateful to our seed investors: XYZ, SweatEquity Ventures, 11.2 Capital and Village Global who participated in this round as well.

Our investors know that our team has deep expertise in building fraud, compliance, and payments infrastructure at companies like Coinbase, Revolut, PayPal, and Bolt. We saw firsthand how hard it is to build a financial application with all the financial risks, regulatory compliance, and legal hurdles that exist.

Fraud — and even just the fear of fraud — has led companies to adopt solutions with high decline rates and high false-positives. These methods stymie growth, create poor user experience, reduce revenue, and degrade customer trust. With the total spend from digital wallets expected to nearly double to $10 trillion by 2025, this growth is gated without proper fraud prevention and the ability for companies to innovate on how to engage their customers.

At Sardine, we’ve developed a behavior-based fraud and compliance platform. At its core is our fraud engine, which analyzes users’ identity, device, and behavior signals to risk-score transactions in real-time. This helps to stop fraud at the time of new customer onboarding, account funding, and during payments in and out of digital wallet.

Today, we’re also excited to announce our instant ACH product, the fastest and safest way to load money into a wallet — available to buy crypto/NFTs instantly, spend on a neobank card, remit abroad or pay suppliers instantly.

Built on top of our fraud-engine, our ACH payment processing and liquidity API settles instantly to digital wallets, while we handle all the risks associated with this — fund-settlement, fraud, AML compliance and regulatory/legal.

Altogether, we’re providing our customers with a way to make their customer experience better and to differentiate their product from others. The results speak for themselves, as in just one quarter, we’ve grown to powering over 50 fintechs, including some of the largest neobanks (Brex and Chipper Cash), fast growing crypto exchanges (FTX, Luno, and Bakkt), and global NFT and crypto platforms (Abra, Transak, MoonPay, and Candy Digital).

This is just the beginning.

To learn more, please visit www.sardine.ai