Sardine, a technology company specialising in artificial intelligence (AI)-driven risk management for fraud prevention, compliance, and credit underwriting, has secured $70m in a Series C funding round.
This latest investment brings the US-based company’s total funding to $145m.
The round was led by Activant Capital, with participation from a range of new and existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Nyca Partners, Geodesic Capital, Moody’s Analytics, Cross Creek Capital, Experian Ventures, and NAventures.
The funding follows a period of significant growth for Sardine, with the company reporting a 130% increase in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2024 and nearly doubling its customer base.
Sardine’s platform is said to have profiled more than 2.2 billion devices, contributing to one of the largest databases dedicated to combating financial crime. Its technology is used by over 300 companies, including FIS, Deel, Ascensus, GoDaddy, and X, to support fraud detection, anti-money laundering measures, and risk operations.
Sardine CEO Soups Ranjan said: “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 has highlighted inefficiencies in legacy fraud detection systems, which often generate high volumes of false positives. This can result in financial institutions freezing accounts, restricting fund access, and declining legitimate customers due to incomplete or inaccurate data.
In response, Sardine is expanding its AI risk platform with a range of intelligent agents designed to improve fraud detection, streamline compliance workflows, and reduce manual intervention in risk management processes.
The new suite of AI agents includes the KYC Onboarding Agent, which is designed to automate identity verification processes by addressing challenges such as name mismatches, inconsistent date formats, and document verification issues.
The Sanctions Screening Agent supports compliance teams in reviewing sanctions lists, Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) data, and adverse media alerts, while maintaining audit logs and validating decisions against standard operating procedures.
The Merchant Risk Agent focuses on automating risk scoring and credit decision-making for merchants, identifying potential risks before onboarding and monitoring changes in real time, including shifts in website content and corporate structures.
The Disputes Agent is responsible for managing the chargeback and dispute process, from data collection to preparing evidence packages formatted to meet payment processor requirements.
Sardine stated that the deployment of these AI agents enables financial institutions to manage compliance and risk functions more efficiently. The automation of critical compliance tasks is projected to deliver up to four times the return on investment (ROI) by allowing risk teams to concentrate on complex cases while maintaining regulatory compliance.
The company also noted that faster resolution of fraud alerts and streamlined onboarding processes could help financial institutions reduce revenue losses linked to customer attrition and mitigate potential legal risks associated with account restrictions.
