Sardine

Sardine is an agentic financial crime platform that unifies fraud prevention, AML compliance, and transaction monitoring in a single system — built initially to serve the specific fraud challenges of cryptocurrency platforms and neobanks, and since expanded to enterprise banking, fintech, and payments companies globally.

Origins in Crypto Fraud

Sardine was founded in February 2020 by three co-founders who met while working at Revolut: Soups Ranjan (CEO), who previously served as Director of Data Science at Coinbase; Aditya Goel, who led strategy at Deutsche Börse; and Zahid Shaikh, an experienced product leader across finance and technology. The company publicly launched in March 2021.

The founding thesis came directly from Ranjan's experience at Coinbase: existing fraud detection tools were designed for e-commerce, not for the unique properties of crypto and instant digital payments, where transactions are often irreversible and pseudonymous. The name itself is a nod to the financial crime world — SARs, or Suspicious Activity Reports, are the regulatory filings that institutions must submit when they detect potential money laundering or fraud.

Sardine's seed round of $4.6 million included Coinbase Ventures, and early customers included [[PROJECT:630]] (MoonPay), Dharma, and Blockchain.com — all crypto-native companies with high fraud exposure at the account opening and payment stages.

Core Platform

The platform is built around three pillars that traditionally required separate vendors: fraud detection, KYC/AML compliance, and risk operations tooling. By combining these into a single data layer, Sardine can correlate signals across the full customer journey — from the moment someone first interacts with a signup form through ongoing transaction monitoring.

Device and behavioral intelligence is Sardine's foundational layer. The platform profiles devices using operating system fingerprinting and sensor data to detect emulators and remote desktop attacks. Behavioral biometrics — typing cadence, scrolling patterns, mouse movement, copy-paste behavior during form completion — are analyzed to distinguish fraudsters from legitimate users. Sardine claims to have profiled over 2.2 billion devices globally, making its network effect a key competitive advantage.

Identity verification sits on top of device intelligence. The platform performs global KYC and KYB verification, document review, synthetic identity detection, deepfake detection, and bank account verification. It cross-references credit bureaus, telcos, social media, and banking data to produce risk scores.

Transaction monitoring covers ACH, wires, SEPA, RTP, FedNow, Zelle, checks, and card payments, with continuous risk rating and case management tooling built in. AML capabilities include sanctions screening, PEP (politically exposed person) screening, customer risk rating, and SAR generation.

Agentic AI Layer

Sardine has invested heavily in AI automation, positioning the platform as what it calls an "agentic risk platform." As of 2026, the company operates ten specialized AI agents: an OSINT Search agent, a Data Analyst, a Rule Assistant, a Transaction Monitoring agent, a Business Due Diligence agent, a Document KYC agent, a PEP Screening agent, a Graph Analyst, a Sanctions Screening agent, and a SAR Generation agent.

Four additional AI agents were announced alongside the company's $70 million Series C funding in February 2025: a KYC Agent (achieving 88% auto-resolution rate in production), a Sanctions Screening Agent with human-in-the-loop design for regulatory compliance, a Merchant Risk Agent, and a Disputes Agent that automates chargeback evidence preparation. The company reported these agents are delivering 4x ROI in production.

Crypto On-Ramp and Solana Support

Separate from its fraud and compliance platform, Sardine operates a Payments division that provides fiat-to-crypto on-ramp infrastructure. This product handles the full Merchant of Record stack: KYC, compliance, payment processing, and fraud liability for crypto purchases via credit card, debit card, or ACH bank transfer.

The on-ramp product supports more than 20 blockchain networks, including Solana, Ethereum, Bitcoin, and various layer-2 networks, allowing users to purchase crypto directly into self-custody wallets. Sardine's instant ACH mechanism allows crypto platforms to provide immediate fund availability to users while Sardine assumes the fraud risk during the settlement window — a model that directly addresses the friction point that traditionally made instant crypto purchases high-risk for platforms.

The payments division also supported NFT checkout — an integration that enabled users to buy NFTs on minting pages and marketplaces using traditional payment methods. A partnership with Tom Brady's Autograph platform demonstrated this, with Sardine reporting a 98% checkout conversion rate in early deployments.

Scale and Customers

Sardine's $70 million Series C in February 2025, led by Activant Capital, brought total funding raised to $145 million. At the time of announcement, the company reported 130% annual recurring revenue growth year-over-year and had more than doubled its enterprise customer base.

The platform now serves 300+ enterprises across 70 countries, including FIS, GoDaddy, Experian, Intuit, Nubank, Gusto, Deel, Brex, and Ramp. Reported customer outcomes include a tier-1 bank preventing 42% of wire fraud via Sardine's Sonar data-sharing network, a commercial neobank reducing chargeback losses by 70%, an expense management platform cutting ACH fraud by 60%, and a B2B intelligence company achieving a 40x improvement in high-risk account detection. Sardine also claims to have processed $1.48 trillion in transaction volume across its platform.

The company operates SardineX, an industry consortium for sharing fraud data across participating institutions — a network-level defense mechanism that makes Sardine's signals collectively richer as more members join.

Solana Ecosystem Relevance

Sardine's relevance to the Solana ecosystem is primarily through its on-ramp and payments infrastructure. By providing Solana support in its on-ramp product alongside KYC, compliance, and fraud prevention, Sardine enables fintech companies and crypto wallets to offer fiat-to-SOL and fiat-to-SPL-token purchases with the full regulatory and fraud stack handled out of the box.

The company's crypto-native heritage — its founders came from Coinbase and built the initial product specifically for crypto's unique fraud profile — means its models are trained on the patterns of crypto-specific fraud, including social engineering attacks, instant-payment reversals, and identity fraud schemes that occur at a higher rate in digital asset onboarding than in traditional banking.

As of mid-2026, Sardine is actively growing, with a SardineCon conference scheduled for San Francisco in August 2026 and a blog publishing on AI-driven fraud operations. The platform has expanded well beyond its crypto roots into enterprise financial services, but its on-ramp and crypto-specific compliance tooling remains a live product line.