Sardine

Sardine is a San Francisco–based financial crime prevention company founded in February 2020 by Soups Ranjan, Aditya Goel, and Zahid Shaikh—three operators who had worked together at Revolut. Ranjan, who serves as CEO, holds a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering and spent years as Director of Data Science and Risk at Coinbase before moving to Revolut as Head of Fincrime Risk. That background gave the founding team a specific insight: traditional identity checks catch the wrong people and miss the right ones. A fraudster can pass KYC; a legitimate customer can trigger false positives. The gap that mattered was behavioral—how someone interacts with a device and a payment flow before any transaction completes.

The company's name nods at that gap. "Sardine" is a reference to Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), the filings that financial institutions submit when they detect fraud or money laundering. Sardine set out to make those filings—and the investigation work behind them—faster, more accurate, and increasingly automated.

Platform Architecture

Sardine's platform operates across three interconnected layers: device and behavioral intelligence, a rules and workflow engine, and a growing suite of AI agents that handle investigation and compliance tasks autonomously.

The device intelligence layer profiles hardware and software fingerprints across 6.6 billion devices worldwide, establishing baselines for legitimate user behavior. On top of that sits behavioral biometrics—the platform monitors how users interact with on-screen elements in real time. Name copy-pasting, excessive window-switching, unnaturally rapid form completion, and inconsistent interaction cadences all correlate with specific fraud typologies. The company's "True Piercing" technology is designed to unmask fraudsters who use VPNs, proxies, or device spoofing to hide their location and identity.

Those signals feed into a rules engine that ships with more than 700 pre-built rulesets covering fraud and AML typologies across the full customer journey. Risk teams can deploy rules without engineering support using a no-code builder; GoDaddy reported reducing rule deployment time from days to hours after moving to Sardine. A cross-industry consortium called SardineX allows participating customers to share fraud signals across the network, creating detection coverage no single institution could build alone.

The most recent evolution of the platform is its agentic AI layer. Sardine has deployed production agents that perform work previously done by human analysts: a KYC Agent that auto-resolves onboarding edge cases at an 88% rate; a Sanctions Screening Agent that reviews compliance alerts with human-in-loop verification; a Merchant Risk Agent that classifies industry categories and monitors seller behavior; and a Disputes Agent that automates chargeback evidence submission. Additional agents handle OSINT search, transaction monitoring, business due diligence, PEP screening, and SAR generation—covering most of the manual workflow in a financial crime operations team.

Product Coverage

Sardine structures its offering into four product areas.

Onboarding encompasses global KYC and KYB verification, document authentication, bank account verification, and credit underwriting. The goal is to stop fraudsters at the point of entry without adding friction for legitimate applicants.

Fraud Prevention covers payment fraud across ACH, wire transfers, SEPA, RTP, FedNow, and Zelle, as well as card issuing fraud, merchant monitoring, refund abuse, and policy fraud detection. A key early product—Instant ACH—allows fintech companies to provide immediate fund availability by fronting capital while Sardine absorbs the fraud risk during the ACH settlement window. This product was especially relevant for crypto on-ramp providers, where users expected instant purchasing power after initiating a bank transfer.

Cybersecurity addresses account takeover, bot-driven credential stuffing, and job applicant fraud—attack vectors that sit upstream of financial crime but enable it at scale.

AML Compliance includes transaction monitoring, customer risk rating, sanctions screening, case management, and sponsor banking oversight. These capabilities allow fintechs and banks to meet Bank Secrecy Act, FinCEN, and international AML requirements within a single platform rather than stitching together point solutions.

Customers and Scale

As of mid-2026, Sardine serves more than 450 enterprise customers in over 70 countries, screening more than $1.67 trillion in annual transaction volume. The customer list spans legacy financial infrastructure (FIS), payroll and payments platforms (Gusto, Deel), consumer fintechs (Nubank), and digital commerce companies (GoDaddy, SeatGeek, ZoomInfo). The platform holds a 4.9 out of 5 rating on G2 and was named to the AIFINTECH 100 list in 2026.

In April 2026, Modulr—a European embedded finance and payments automation platform serving payroll, supplier payment, and lending use cases—integrated Sardine's fraud detection and AML capabilities into its Risk and Compliance Hub. Ranjan described the business rationale plainly: "When funds move instantly, risk decisions need to happen just as quickly."

Funding and Team

Sardine has raised approximately $170 million to date. The Series C round of $70 million, closed in February 2025 and led by Activant Capital, brought in Andreessen Horowitz (which also led the Series A and Series B), Google Ventures, Nyca Partners, Moody's Analytics, Experian Ventures, and Geodesic Capital. Earlier investors include Visa.

The current executive team alongside Ranjan includes Zahid Shaikh as Chief Product Officer, Kazuki Nishiura as Chief Technology Officer, and Ben Cook as Chief Financial Officer. The company hosts SardineCon, an annual practitioner conference focused on fraud and compliance operations; SardineCon SF 2026 reflects the company's San Francisco home base.

Relevance to the Solana Ecosystem

Sardine does not have a direct on-chain integration with Solana. Its fraud detection operates at the application layer—between users, devices, and payment rails—rather than at the blockchain protocol layer. However, the company's origins are deeply intertwined with crypto. Ranjan built his expertise at Coinbase, where he first encountered the specific fraud dynamics of irreversible digital asset transactions. Sardine's early customer base included Blockchain.com, MoonPay, and other crypto-adjacent platforms, and the Instant ACH product was purpose-built for fiat-to-crypto on-ramp providers that needed to offer instant liquidity while managing chargeback and fraud risk on the fiat side of the transaction.

Any exchange, wallet, or on-ramp operating on or around Solana that handles fiat rails—ACH deposits, wire withdrawals, card purchases—operates in the fraud and compliance environment that Sardine was built to address. As Solana-based consumer applications and institutional products mature and require enterprise-grade risk infrastructure, Sardine represents the category of compliance tooling they would reach for.