NAventures - Why We Invested – Sardine

NAventures is pleased to announce our most recent investment in Sardine, a comprehensive fraud and compliance solution provider.

Context

At NAventures, we love searching for solutions to fintech's biggest challenges. Every so often, we come across companies – like Duality and Sardine – that deliver innovative solutions to some of the toughest challenges in financial services.

One of the biggest challenges faced by scaling fintechs, Web 3 companies, and financial institutions is fraud prevention. If fraud controls are too tight, they result in false positives and hinder growth. If fraud controls are too loose, they expose providers to losses, reputational risk, and significant fines.

Finding the right balance is a constant struggle – even more so for Web 3 companies that face additional onboarding barriers.

Lucky for us, innovators such as Sardine are working towards letting financial services providers have our cake and eat it too!

Why Sardine?

An overlooked perk of corporate venture capital is unfiltered access to our colleagues' pain points. From discussions at the water cooler to coffee chats to more formal conversations, we are constantly exposed to our colleagues' top-of-mind opportunities and challenges.

One constant challenge is the trade-off between customer experience and security – or the lack thereof. As a preeminent financial institution, NBC won't sacrifice security, even if it negatively impacts customer acquisition rates. A real challenge for our peers responsible for NBC's digital experience, especially as customers grow accustomed to seamless digital experiences.

This trade-off challenge isn't unique to NBC. It is industry wide. And Sardine’s co-founder and CEO experienced it first-hand. Following years building fraud and compliance functions for prominent fintechs, Soups Ranjan knew there had to be a better way than piece together the function from scratch.

So he gathered a team of fraud-fighting experts, fintech nerds, and company builders to build the tools he wished he had in his previous roles. Together, they built a company that offers a single API to boost fraud, reduce customer friction, and reduce false positives – the perfect trifecta in fraud prevention and mitigation.

While their initial target has primarily been Web 3 companies and fintechs, their solution is also gaining traction across incumbent financial institutions seeking modern and flexible tools to fight fraud. Sardine has also developed a risk-free instant payment settlement service, which it is progressively expanding across traditional rails, that is also gaining interest from incumbents.

Congrats to Soups, Adi, Alex, and the team. We look forward to our continued collaboration and are pleased to join the impressive array of investors supporting Sardine, including a16z, XYZ ventures, Nyca Partners, Visa, Google, ING Ventures, and ConsenSys.

The NAventures Team,