Sardine

AI-powered fraud prevention and compliance platform for real-time payments, offering instant ACH-to-crypto on-ramps and risk management for fintechs and crypto companies. $51.5M Series B led by a16z. Backed by Visa, Experian, and FIS. $23M revenue in 2024. 250+ enterprise customers.

Sardine solves the fraud problem that makes instant payments risky—its instant ACH settlement product closes the gap between traditional rails and crypto-speed settlement.

sardine.ai Payment Infrastructure

United Statesprivate

At a glance

Total raised

$145.6M

last round series c

Headcount

—

no public estimate on record

Headquarters

San Francisco

United States

Founded

2020

6 years active

Status

Private

Payment Infrastructure

Subsector

Payment Infrastructure

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Funding history

Total raised

$145.6M

Rounds tracked

Latest stage

Series C

Date	Stage	Amount	Valuation	Lead investors
Feb 11, 2025	Series C	$70M	—	Activant Capital
Sep 19, 2022	Series B	$51.5M	—	Andreessen Horowitz
Feb 8, 2022	Series A	$19.5M	—	Andreessen Horowitz
Aug 1, 2020	Seed	$4.6M	—	XYZ Venture Capital

Founder backgrounds

Soups Ranjan

CEO & Co-founder

Before co-founding Sardine, Soups Ranjan was Director of Engineering at Coinbase, where he led risk and data engineering teams. He joined Coinbase through the 2018 acquisition of Pathalysis, a blockchain analytics startup focused on transaction monitoring and compliance for crypto businesses, where he was a core member. Earlier in his career, he was an early engineer at a quantitative trading firm and held engineering roles at several technology companies. He holds a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur. His background bridging blockchain analytics and risk engineering directly informed Sardine's AI-powered fraud and compliance platform for real-time payments.

Zach Abrams

CTO & Co-founder

Prior to Sardine, co-founded **Even** — a fintech platform focused on earned wage access and financial stability — where he served as CTO. Even was acquired by PayPal in 2021. Before Even, he was an early engineer at **Dwolla**, the ACH payments network, and previously worked at **Balanced**, a payments API platform later acquired by Stripe. This deep background in real-time payments infrastructure and digital banking directly informs Sardine's approach to fraud detection and compliance for instant payouts, on-ramps, and card-issuing products.

AI bull / bear

Bull case

Sardine occupies one of the few wedge points in fintech infrastructure that actually widens over time. Its AI-driven fraud engine ingests behavioral, device, and identity signals across 250+ enterprise deployments, and each new customer makes the model sharper. The instant ACH-to-crypto on-ramp is not a feature — it is a settlement primitive that collapses the latency between legacy rails and real-time crypto markets, letting fintechs offer something banks structurally cannot. With $23 million in 2024 revenue and a $70 million Series C closed in February 2025, Sardine has a long runway to convert that product lead into market share. Strategic backing from Visa, Experian, and FIS signals that the incumbents see Sardine as infrastructure, not a competitor. As real-time payments mandates spread globally, the compliance layer becomes mandatory, not optional — and Sardine is already embedded in the stack.

Bear case

Sardine has raised $146 million against $23 million in annual revenue, a ratio that demands a steep and sustained growth trajectory just to justify the Series C valuation. The fraud-detection space is brutally contested: Sift, Forter, and Riskified already operate at scale, and every major payment processor is building native AI risk tools. Sardine’s crypto-facing revenue — the instant ACH-to-crypto on-ramp — is structurally exposed to a regulatory cycle that could curtail crypto-fiat corridors without warning. If the US adopts a hostile posture toward crypto banking interfaces, that product line becomes a liability rather than a differentiator. Meanwhile, the 250 enterprise logos likely include many small deployments; landing large banks and processors requires multi-year sales cycles that burn cash faster than the $70 million round implies. The bull case assumes Sardine defines the category; the bear case is that it gets absorbed or lapped before it can.

Generated by deepseek-v4-pro · May 2, 2026Refreshes quarterly · see disclosures

In the news

Leadership

Soups Ranjan

CEO & Co-founder

in 𝕏

Products

Sardine Fraud Prevention Platform
An AI-powered fraud detection platform that uses behavioral biometrics, device intelligence, and transaction monitoring to protect fintech and crypto companies from real-time payment fraud. It analyzes user behavior patterns and device characteristics to detect anomalies and prevent fraudulent transactions before they settle.
Sardine Instant ACH
An instant ACH-to-crypto on-ramp that enables fintech and crypto platforms to convert fiat currency to digital assets in real-time. It combines payment processing with built-in fraud protection, allowing users to instantly access purchased crypto while the platform is protected from ACH returns and chargebacks.
Sardine Compliance
A compliance suite offering KYC (Know Your Customer), KYB (Know Your Business), and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) solutions designed specifically for fintech and crypto companies. It automates identity verification, sanctions screening, and transaction monitoring to help businesses meet regulatory requirements.
Sardine Identity
An identity verification and authentication product that combines document verification, liveness detection, and biometric matching. It helps businesses verify users during onboarding and provides ongoing authentication to prevent account takeover and synthetic identity fraud.

Open roles

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Sardine

At a glance

Subscribe to see the full profile

Funding history

Founder backgrounds

Soups Ranjan

Zach Abrams

AI bull / bear

In the news

National Bank of Canada leads $25 million Series C extension in Sardine

Why the DIY KYC Model Is Facing a Fraud Reality Check

Bots Turn Identity Into a Real-Time Test

Leadership

Products

Sardine Fraud Prevention Platform

Sardine Instant ACH

Sardine Compliance

Sardine Identity

Open roles

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