Andreessen Horowitz makes latest crypto investment, leading Sardine’s $51.5m Series B

Sardine, a fintech providing crypto compliance infrastructure and fraud prevention, has raised a £51m Series B funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz, one of the biggest investors in crypto startups. 

Other investors in the round include XYZ, Nyca Partners, Sound Ventures, Activant Capital, Visa, Google Ventures, Eric Schmidt, Vikram Pandit, The General Partnership, NAventures, ING Ventures, ConsenSys, Cross River Digital Ventures, Alloy Labs, and Uniswap Labs Ventures.

Sardine’s customers include fintech and web3 startups such as FTX, Blockchain.com, Wealthsimple, Brave, and Digit.

The new cash will be used to accelerate the development of its fraud and compliance platform as well as its card and instant ACH to crypto on-ramp & NFT checkout products.

“Faster payments means faster fraud. As Zelle, RTP and FedNow become increasingly popular, consumers are increasingly vulnerable to social engineering attacks where they are convinced to buy something that never arrives or invest in a scam” said Soups Ranjan, CEO of Sardine. 

“Secondly, Financial Institutions only know that their customers bought ETH or USDC, not what they do with it afterwards. What is needed is a new way of looking at fraud prevention, one which deeply inspects user behaviour at the time of purchase, and combines it with what happens to the funds downstream. That’s exactly what we built at Sardine,” he added.