SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Sardine, the leading AI risk platform for fraud, compliance, and credit underwriting, announced a $70 million Series C funding round, bringing the total capital raised to $145 million. The round was led by Activant Capital, with participation from new and existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Nyca Partners, Google Ventures, Geodesic Capital, Cross Creek Capital, Moody’s Analytics, Experian Ventures, and NAventures.
In 2024, Sardine achieved 130% YoY ARR growth and nearly doubled its customer base. The company also surpassed 2.2 billion devices profiled, making the Sardine Network one of the largest and most up-to-date databases for combating financial crime. Today, more than 300 enterprises, including FIS, Ascensus, Deel, GoDaddy, and X, rely on Sardine to prevent fraud, stop money laundering, and streamline risk operations.
“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,” said Soups Ranjan, CEO of Sardine.
Legacy fraud systems are imperfect, which is why human oversight can be critical. But the sheer volume of false positives forces risk teams at banks and fintechs to freeze accounts, restrict access to funds, and turn away good customers based on incomplete or inaccurate data. Without AI to reduce noise and surface real threats faster, teams struggle to keep up.
Ranjan added: “KYC may be easy, but edge cases are hard. 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. And they add up. When teams are dealing with dozens or even hundreds of alerts per day, the backlog becomes unmanageable. Sardine’s AI agents automate the heavy lifting, surfacing connections and summarizing risk signals so teams can move faster and focus on making the right call.”
“Sardine’s platform is now the core of our risk and fraud workflows, allowing us to consolidate vendors and improve operational efficiency,” said Arjun Ramakrishnan, Head of Risk for GoDaddy Payments. “By migrating to Sardine, we’ve significantly reduced our reliance on engineering, cutting rule deployment timelines from days to hours. Sardine’s flexibility has also helped us expand beyond fraud detection into credit risk evaluation to mitigate potential losses during high-sales periods.”
Introducing AI Agents for Fraud and Compliance Teams
Sardine is expanding its AI risk platform with a suite of intelligent agents designed to streamline fraud and compliance operations, reduce manual workloads, and cut costs for financial institutions. These AI agents automate critical investigation and compliance processes, allowing risk teams to focus on complex cases while ensuring accuracy and regulatory compliance. This investment will build on key advancements, including:
- KYC Onboarding Agent – Streamlines the trickiest parts of onboarding – name mismatches across cultures, inconsistent date formats, and document verification challenges. Instead of forcing good customers to wait in review queues, the agent resolves edge cases automatically while maintaining compliance with human oversight.
- Sanctions Screening Agent – Helps your team efficiently review sanctions, Politically Exposed Persons (PEP), and adverse media alerts. It learns your standard operating procedures (SOP), provides detailed audit logs, and supports decision validation.
- Merchant Risk Agent – Automates risk scoring and credit decisioning for merchants, detecting high-risk signals before approval. It monitors for changes in real-time, from website content shifts to corporate structure updates.
- Disputes Agent – Handles the entire chargeback and dispute process, from gathering data to preparing evidence packages. It formats submissions to match processor requirements and files them automatically, reducing manual work and improving win rates.
Deploying AI agents allows financial institutions to drive revenue growth while strengthening compliance controls. Risk teams can scale compliance efforts efficiently, achieving up to 4X ROI. In today’s age of instant gratification, onboarding delays can result in lost customers who are highly unlikely to return. Faster alert resolution helps banks and fintechs prevent significant revenue losses from onboarding inefficiencies. Moreover, reducing long queues and delays not only retains customers but also mitigates the risk of costly lawsuits from those who feel unfairly denied financial access.
“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,” said Andrew Steele, Partner at Activant Capital. “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. We’ve witnessed their exceptional execution firsthand over the past few years, and believe they’re becoming the essential infrastructure layer for trust in the digital economy.”
Arvind Ayyala, Partner at Geodesic Capital: “In an AI-first world where enterprise fraud and compliance risks are constantly evolving, real-time threat detection is essential. Sardine’s platform delivers the speed, accuracy, and adaptability risk leaders need to stay ahead. 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.”
Andrew Bockelman, Head of Banking Solutions at Moody’s: “The combination of Moody’s robust data with Sardine’s innovative platform creates a formidable tool in the fight against financial crime, providing incredible value to our banking and merchant customers. We are excited to strengthen our partnership with Sardine and look forward to continued innovations in the future.”
Angela Strange, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz: “Many of the best fraud and compliance teams are turning to Sardine to harness the potential of GenAI while staying ahead of increasingly sophisticated AI-driven threats. Built by leading data scientists, Sardine’s developer environment and feature store enable the consolidation of disparate vendor signals, incorporating the newest defenses and adapting models seamlessly—without the need for additional engineering talent. Sardine’s AI agents help compliance teams to complete tasks like clearing transaction alerts in a fraction of the time. We’re thrilled to continue supporting Soups and his team as they redefine the future of risk management.”
Read more about Sardine’s journey, vision and plans for the future in Soups Ranjan’s blog.
About Sardine
Sardine is the leading AI risk platform for fraud prevention, compliance, and credit underwriting, trusted by enterprises in over 70 countries. Using device intelligence, behavior biometrics, and machine learning, Sardine stops fraud in real time, streamlines compliance, and unifies data across risk teams. Backed by world-class investors and partners including Andreessen Horowitz, Activant Capital, Visa, Experian, Moody’s, and FIS, Sardine is redefining risk management for the real-time economy. Learn more at sardine.ai.
Contacts
Media Contact:
Aaron Berger
917.355.8959
aaron@am.partners
