Coinbase alum Soups Ranjan reveals his anti-fraud startup, raises $4.6 million
Soups Ranjan, former director of data science and risk at Coinbase, has come out of stealth with a new anti-fraud startup called Sardine.
Sardine has been in stealth mode since February 2020 and has now launched a fraud prevention-as-a-service platform for digital businesses.
Using advanced artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, Sardine helps online businesses detect fraud such as identity and payment frauds. Ranjan believes that companies who take fraud seriously at the time of their launch are the ones who survive.
"We have built the first zero-day fraud prevention technology to catch bad actors no matter what they do, because we look for intrinsic behavior patterns," said Ranjan, who left Coinbase in February 2019. "With Sardine, a fraudster can swim but never hide."
Sardine aggregates data points around browser fingerprinting, mobile device attributes, network traffic, sensor data, and intrinsic user behavior to identify bad actors. The startup's service then provides machine-learned fraud scores and user behavior biometrics to detect fraudsters.
Dharma, Moonpay, Unifimoney, and Relay Financial are some of the existing clients of Sardine.
As Sardine comes out of stealth, it has also disclosed that it raised $4.6 million in a seed round. XYZ Ventures led the round, with participation from Coinbase Ventures; Dan Romero, former VP of Coinbase; Adam Nash, former CEO and president of WealthFront; and several others.
"Sardine's team is made up of the best and brightest, where they helped scale Coinbase by 1,000x, launched Revolut's US business, fought ghost-riding at Uber, and built fraud protection for Bolt and PayPal," said Ross Fubini, founder and managing partner of XYZ Ventures. "That's why we're excited to invest in Sardine's anti-fraud platform."
