Sardine is a fraud and financial crime risk platform for banks, fintechs and merchants. It helps risk and compliance teams spot fraud in real time and meet anti-money laundering obligations, from the moment a customer signs up through to every payment they make.
The problem it addresses is that fraud and compliance teams usually see only their own slice of a customer’s activity. Sardine gives both teams the same signals and the same record of each customer.
At A Glance
| Vendor | Sardine |
|---|---|
| Category | Fraud prevention, AML compliance and identity verification |
| Identities covered | Consumers, businesses, merchants, job applicants and their devices |
| Agentic AI | Agent Hub and agents for fraud and AML operations |
| Customers | FIS, GoDaddy, Deel, bunq, National Bank of Canada |
| Funding | A reported $170 million raised |
| Market classification | Identity Verification |
What Sardine Does
Fraud teams and compliance teams often work from separate tools, each seeing only part of a customer’s activity. Sardine covers the whole customer lifecycle on one platform, from sign-up and login through onboarding to every payment and the compliance work that follows. Because the same signals feed every stage, a device or account flagged at onboarding can be traced later across transactions, accounts and other devices. Automated decisions and human review sit in one workflow rather than being stitched together across tools.
Products
Device And Behaviour
Device intelligence and behavioural biometrics identify the device behind a session and how the person is interacting with it. True Piercing goes a step further and exposes fraudsters who try to hide their real location or IP address. These signals underpin the rest of the platform.
Onboarding
Onboarding gives fintechs and banks the checks they need before opening an account or extending credit:
- Global KYC and KYB checks
- Identity and document verification
- Bank verification and credit underwriting
Fraud Prevention
For payment providers, card issuers and merchants, the fraud products watch payments, card issuing and bank transactions as they happen. They also cover merchant fraud and the losses that come from refund and policy abuse, which matters to marketplaces and online retailers.
Cyber Security
Account takeover protection and bot detection defend login and account flows against credential attacks and automated abuse. Job applicant fraud detection helps employers catch fake or impersonated candidates during hiring.
AML Compliance
Compliance teams at banks and sponsor banks use this product for transaction monitoring and customer risk rating, together with sanctions screening and case management. It also supports sponsor banking programmes, where a bank oversees the risk of fintech partners operating on its licence.
How It Works
A set of shared components sits behind every product, so signals collected once are reused across fraud and compliance decisions.
| Component | What it does |
|---|---|
| Sardine Flow | The workflow layer. It joins data, rules, AI agents and human review, and includes integration nodes for enrichment and document output such as Markdown rendering and PDF generation. |
| Consortium data | Fraud intelligence shared across industries through the Sardine network, including the Sonar consortium. |
| Rules Engine and ML models | Turn the collected signals into decisions and risk scores. |
| Connections Graph | Maps relationships between users, devices and transactions so investigators can follow linked activity. |
Identities And Systems Covered
| Consumers | Identity and document verification, behavioural biometrics and account takeover protection. |
|---|---|
| Businesses and merchants | KYB checks, merchant risk and merchant fraud detection. |
| Job applicants | Detection of fraudulent candidates. |
| Devices | Device intelligence and location unmasking. |
| Transactions | Payment, card and bank transaction monitoring. |
Agentic AI Capabilities
Agent Hub
Agent Hub is a single console for all of a customer’s Sardine agents. Analysts can chat with an agent, run one against an alert queue, put one on a schedule, or call it from their own systems.
Fraud And AML Agents
The agent set covers OSINT search, data analysis, transaction monitoring, document KYC, PEP screening, graph analysis, sanctions screening and SAR generation. A Merchant Risk Agent automates risk scoring and credit decisioning for merchants. Other systems can message a Sardine agent through the A2A protocol from within Sardine Flow.
Company Background
| Leadership | Soups Ranjan, CEO and Co-Founder; Aditya Goel, Co-founder; Zahid Shaikh, Chief Product Officer; Kazuki Nishiura, Chief Technology Officer; Ben Cook, Chief Financial Officer. |
|---|---|
| Funding | A $70 million Series C in February 2025 led by Activant Capital, with Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures participating, followed in May 2026 by a $25 million Series C extension led by National Bank of Canada. |
| Investors | Also include Visa, Experian, FIS, Moody’s and Geodesic. |
| Scale | More than 450 reported enterprise customers, 1.8 trillion dollars in payments screened and over 6.5 billion devices profiled. |
| Recognition | Included in The Forrester Wave: Financial Crime Management Solutions, Q3 2026, and recognised in the Datos Insights Awards for FinCrime Convergence. |
Note: This overview is compiled from Sardine’s publicly available information as of 3 November 2026. It is provided for information only. NHI Mgmt Group does not endorse any vendor, and nothing on this page represents the opinions of NHI Mgmt Group.