Sardine Raises $70 Million to Expand AI Risk Platform

Sardine raised $70 million in a Series C funding round to expand its artificial intelligence risk platform for fraud, compliance and credit underwriting.

“This funding will accelerate our mission to rebuild trust in financial services,” Sardine CEO Soups Ranjan said in a Tuesday (Feb. 11) blog post. “We’re expanding our enterprise capabilities, growing globally and advancing our AI agent platform.”

Sardine uses device intelligence, behavior biometrics and machine learning to stop fraud in real time, streamline compliance and unify data across risk teams, according to a Tuesday press release. The company has profiled 2.2 billion devices.

Its AI agents use these resources to automate tasks that are highly repetitive yet mission-critical, such as clearing transaction alerts, verifying onboarding cases and investigating fraud rings, per the release.

By deploying these agents, financial institutions can scale their compliance efforts efficiently, reduce onboarding delays that can lead to lost customers, resolve alerts faster and mitigate the risk of lawsuits from customers who think they’ve been unfairly denied financial access, the release said.

Sardine also announced in its Tuesday press release that it added four new AI agents, including a know your customer (KYC) onboarding agent that streamlines onboarding, a sanctions screening agent that helps teams review sanctions, a merchant risk agent that automates risk scoring and credit decisioning for merchants, and a disputes agent that handles the entire chargeback and dispute process.

The company’s latest funding round was led by Activant Capital.

“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,” Andrew Steele, partner at Activant Capital, said in the release. “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.”

Sardine’s platform monitors user behavior and device information when they interact with a company’s website or app, looking for red flags that might indicate fraud, such as unusual typing patterns, mismatched location information or the use of tools designed to hide a user’s true identity, Ranjan told PYMNTS in an interview posted in October.

“We like to say that there’s never a single silver bullet,” Ranjan said. “So, you have to have a variety of signals. However, what we at Sardine have found is that some of the best signals, which are indicators of fraud as well as authorized push payment scams, are actually device and behavior signals, which is what Sardine specializes in.”

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