Sardine
Fraud and anti-money-laundering software for banks, fintechs and merchants, valued at a company-stated $660M in 2025, now betting that AI agents can clear the alert backlog analysts cannot.
Bloomberg Law, Feb 11, 2025; Sardine site- Valuation
- $660M Series C, Feb 2025, as stated by the company. The May 2026 extension gave no price.
- Raised
- $170M in total, per Sardine, after a $25M extension led by National Bank of Canada in May 2026.
- Growth
- 500% in two years revenue growth the CEO cited in May 2026. No dollar figure published; ARR grew 130% in 2024.
- Watch
- Co-founder exit COO and co-founder Aditya Goel left in 2026 to build his own company; ex-Visa risk chief Mike Lemberger replaced him.
- AI
- Agents in production Agent Hub (Sep 2026) puts seven investigation and compliance agents in one dashboard.
- Liquidity
- No tender found But Sardine says leavers get up to 4 years to exercise options, not the usual 90 days.
- Hiring
- 31 → 37 remote listings since Oct 10.
Usage-priced risk software, sold to the companies that move money.
Sardine scores devices, behavior, identities and transactions in real time, and runs KYC, fraud, AML monitoring and sanctions screening on one platform. Customers it names include FIS, National Bank of Canada, GoDaddy, Intuit, Nubank and Deel. Its custom agents are priced on usage and built with forward deployed engineers. No revenue split is published.
Sardine custom risk agents page; sardine.ai home- 1A large shared pool of device and behavior dataSardine says it has profiled more than 6.5B devices and screened $1.8T in payments across its network.Sardine About page
- 2Fraud and AML on one platform, rated a LeaderNamed a Leader in The Forrester Wave for financial crime management, Q3 2026, alongside SAS and SymphonyAI.Sardine, Forrester Wave Q3 2026 page
- 3Banks that invest, then deployNational Bank of Canada ran a live trial, then led a $25M extension and signed a multi-year rollout across retail, commercial and wealth.FinTech Global, May 21, 2026
- NICE$6.63Blisted, Oct 30 close
- Socure$4.50Bprivate, Nov 9
- Feedzai$2.00Bprivate, Oct 2
- Sardine$660MSeries C, Feb 11
Private values are the last reported round; they can be stale. Listed values are market value. Bars start at zero.
Every round, and what its terms give away.
Sardine is private, so there is no share price. What its investors paid, and on what terms, is the closest thing to one.
- $660M
- latest valuation, Series C Feb 11
- $170M
- raised in all
- +130%
- growth, as reported
- 200
- employees, as reported
ARR grew 130% in 2024, per the company; the CEO cited 500% revenue growth over two years in May 2026. No revenue or profit figure disclosed.
Biometric Update, Feb 2025; Sardine About and careers pages- May 21Series C extension$25MLed by National Bank of CanadaPaired with a multi-year deal to deploy Sardine across the bank. Total raised now $170M.FinTech Global, May 21, 2026
- Feb 11Series C$70M at $660MLed by Activant Capital. About 11% of the company, if all new sharesa16z, Nyca, GV, Geodesic, Moody's Analytics, Experian Ventures and NAventures joined. Valuation stated by the company.Bloomberg Law and Biometric Update, Feb 11, 2025
- Sep 20Series B$52MLed by Andreessen Horowitz (Growth Fund)Visa, GV, Activant, ING Ventures, ConsenSys and Eric Schmidt also invested.TechCrunch, Sep 20, 2022
- Feb 11Series A$20MLed by Andreessen Horowitza16z partner Angela Strange and XYZ's Ross Fubini joined the board.FF News, Feb 11, 2022; TechCrunch, Sep 2022
- Down round or flat round?Cannot compare. The $660M Series C price was company-stated, no Series A or B price was reported, and the 2026 extension gave none. No down round has been reported.Bloomberg Law; FinTech GlobalOpen
- How much of the company the last priced round soldAbout 10.6% ($70M of $660M), a normal size for a Series C. The $25M extension price is unknown.Bloomberg Law, Feb 11, 2025Clear
- Time since the last raiseAbout five and a half months (May 2026 extension). The gap before that was 15 months.FinTech Global, May 21, 2026Clear
- Structured or unusual termsNo liquidation preference, ratchet or warrant terms reported for any round. No SEC Form D was found to check.FinTech Global; EDGAR search Nov 3, 2026Open
- New outside lead or insiders only?The 2026 extension was led by an existing backer (National Bank of Canada, already in via NAventures) that is also a customer. The 2025 round had a new lead in Activant, though Activant had joined the Series B.FinTech Global, May 2026; TechCrunch, Sep 2022Flag
- Employee liquidityNo tender offer or staff secondary found. Sardine does offer early exercise and up to 4 years to exercise options after leaving.Sardine careers pageOpen
- Layoffs in the last 12 monthsSearched news for Sardine layoffs: none reported. The careers page says 200+ staff in over 20 countries.Sardine careers; news search Nov 3, 2026Clear
Clear: checked, nothing found. Flag: found, with the source. Open: could not be checked.
No filing reported
What the record says, and what we think it means.
The fact is the source's. The read, in italics, is ours.
- 01Good
A big Canadian bank tested it, then bought more of it.
FinTech Global, May 21, 2026National Bank of Canada led a $25M Series C extension in May 2026 after a live evaluation, and signed a multi-year deal to roll out Sardine's device intelligence and risk scoring across retail, commercial and wealth.
Banks are slow, careful buyers. A bank that is investor and customer at once suggests more bank deals are the growth plan.
- 02Watch
A co-founder stepped back from running operations.
The Financial Technology Report, May 4, 2026COO and co-founder Aditya Goel left to build his own company, keeping his board seat. Mike Lemberger, Visa's former North America chief risk officer and a Sardine advisor since mid-2025, became COO.
A friendly exit by its telling. The hire points at bigger enterprise and bank deals; watch whether other early leaders follow Goel out.
- 03Good
Named a Leader by Forrester in financial crime software.
Sardine, Forrester Wave pageSardine is a Leader in The Forrester Wave for financial crime management solutions, Q3 2026, next to SAS and SymphonyAI.
Analyst ratings help a young vendor get onto bank shortlists against much older suppliers.
- 04Good
Options do not vanish 90 days after you leave.
Sardine careers pageSardine's careers page offers early exercise and up to 4 years to exercise options after separation, against the common 90-day window.
Useful if you join and later leave before any sale or IPO: you get years, not weeks, to decide whether to pay to exercise.
- 05Neutral
It grew up selling to crypto firms, FTX included.
TechCrunch, Sep 2022; sardine.ai homeEarly customers named in 2022 included FTX, Blockchain.com, MoonPay and Wealthsimple. Customers it names now include FIS, Intuit, Nubank and National Bank of Canada.
The customer base has moved toward banks and large fintechs, which lowers exposure to crypto swings.
- 06Neutral
No clear headquarters.
Sardine privacy policy; Bloomberg Law; careers pageBloomberg Law called Sardine San Francisco-based in 2025. Its privacy policy lists a Miami mailbox address for SardineAI Corp. Its careers page names no office and says staff work in over 20 countries.
Consistent with a remote-friendly company: expect your team to be spread across time zones.
- 07Neutral
It checks job applicants for fraud, including its own.
Sardine engineering blog, May 1, 2025A 2025 engineering post describes screening Sardine's own applicants via Ashby webhooks, checking IP, email and phone signals, and capturing device data when candidates open interview links. It now sells job applicant fraud detection.
If you apply, expect VPNs, new email addresses or location mismatches to draw a closer look.
- 08Watch
Rivals are getting bigger or getting bought.
Visa, Dec 2024; SiliconANGLE, Oct 2025Visa bought fraud vendor Featurespace in Dec 2024. Feedzai raised $75M at more than $2B in Oct 2025 and won a framework role for digital euro fraud detection.
Sardine competes with networks and better-funded specialists. Consolidation also means potential buyers for it.
Engineering is paid about the same as the market.
We save every company's roles, pay by team and level, AI share and churn every day, so each month this page can say more. Sparklines use their own scale.
Can AI agents do business with Sardine?
We checked the agent payment programs, developer docs and site rules an AI assistant would meet.
Readable by AI, built with agents. Its site and docs are open to AI tools, but no public MCP server lets outside agents act.
Still Remote read- YesAn llms.txt on the main sitesardine.ai/llms.txt exists (generated Oct 15, 2026) and every content page has a Markdown twin at the same URL plus .md.checked Nov 3, 2026
- MixedDocs that AI tools can readdocs.sardine.ai/llms.txt indexes the public guides in Markdown. Full API documentation sits behind an access request.checked Nov 3, 2026
- YesLets AI crawlers read its siterobots.txt allows all user agents and names no AI bots. It disallows only /playground and /whitepaper/.checked Nov 3, 2026
- Not foundA public MCP server for AI agentsNone in its docs index or site index. A 2025 engineering post mentions an internal MCP server that knows Sardine's API.Sardine engineering blog; docs llms.txt checked Nov 3, 2026
- Not foundAgent payment protocols (Google AP2, OpenAI/Stripe ACP, Visa or Mastercard agent programs)No announced tie-in found. Sardine writes about how fraud teams should investigate agent-initiated payments.Sardine blog, Jul 24, 2026; search Nov 3, 2026
- YesSells AI agentsAgent Hub runs agents for rules, data analysis, document KYC, OSINT, graph analysis, business due diligence and sanctions screening, in chat, on alert queues or on a schedule.Sardine blog, Sep 14, 2026
Where Sardine puts AI to work.
- 1Interviews assume you code with AISince 2025 engineering candidates bring their own IDE and AI assistants to a practical risk-scoring exercise; the CTO wrote that AI is essential to daily development.Sardine engineering blog, Jun 11, 2025
- 2Internal tools built with AI in hoursAt a company hackathon the CTO built a fake-applicant screener in four hours using Cursor and an internal MCP server for Sardine's API.Sardine engineering blog, May 1, 2025
- 3Automation moved the bottleneck, not the peopleSardine says automated rule deployment cut deploys from days to minutes, but the slow part became checking theories against data, where its agents now aim.Sardine blog, Aug 6, 2026
More listings than on Sep 7, led by engineering.
What has to be true for $660 million to hold?
Sardine does not publish revenue, so the starting number is your assumption, not ours. A way to think, not a forecast, and not investment advice.
At 25x, Sardine needs $26 million of revenue to be worth $660 million. Your world gets there with $138 million, so the next round likely prices above the last.
$100,000 of equity valued at the $660M Series C price would be worth about $520,985 on paper in this world, before dilution from new rounds, taxes and vesting. Private shares only turn into cash at a sale, an IPO or a tender offer.
A way to think, not a forecast, and not investment advice.
Bloomberg Law, Feb 11, 2025The signals, and which way they push.
- TailwindBanks are buying.
National Bank of Canada's rollout and investment, with FIS among named customers, show Sardine selling up-market beyond fintechs.
- TailwindAgents are shipping, not promised.
Four agents were live by the Series C; Agent Hub brought seven together in Sep 2026, sold on usage pricing.
- TailwindFast growth by its own account.
ARR up 130% in 2024 and revenue up 500% over two years, per the company. No dollar figure to check against.
- HeadwindBigger rivals with deeper pockets.
Visa owns Featurespace and Feedzai is valued at more than $2B, about three times Sardine's last stated price.
Where Sardine ends up, if we had to bet.
Our calls, not facts. Each one is tied to something that already happened, so you can judge the reasoning.
- 1
Sardine lists on a public exchange by 2031.
Long shot 16%IPOIts last stated value was $660M with $170M raised, small for a fintech IPO. No filing or banker hire has been reported.
Bloomberg Law; Sardine About page - 2
A card network, credit bureau or bank processor buys Sardine by 2033.
Coin flip 50%M&AVisa bought Featurespace in 2024. Visa, Experian, Moody's and National Bank of Canada already sit on Sardine's investor list, and FIS is a customer.
Visa, Dec 2024; Biometric Update; TechCrunch - 3
Banks and wealth managers become Sardine's main growth line.
Likely 72%RevenueThe 2026 extension came with a multi-year bank rollout, and the new COO was hired to grow enterprise relationships.
FinTech Global; The Financial Technology Report - 4
At most Sardine customers, an agent handles the first review of every alert.
Likely 72%AIAgent Hub can already run agents automatically on alert queues. Sardine says agents cut manual review from 30+ minutes to near zero on eligible cases.
Sardine Series C post; Agent Hub post - 5
Sardine is still an independent top-tier fincrime vendor in 2032.
Coin flip 50%CompetitionIt is a Forrester Leader and growing fast. But rivals are owned by networks or valued far higher.
Sardine, Forrester Wave page; SiliconANGLE
Read by the Still Remote research agent on November 3, 2026 from the sources linked on this page. Facts and scenarios only, not investment advice.