- Former Coinbase employee Soups Ranjan has launched Sardine, which detects fraud on fintech services.
- Sardine raised $4.6 million from investors, including XYZ Venture Capital and Coinbase Ventures.
- Ranjan is among the Coinbase alums who have recently gone on to launch their own startups.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
The Coinbase “mafia” just keeps growing. Sardine, a fraud-prevention startup led by Soups Ranjan, a former employee of the cryptocurrency exchange, has raised $4.6 million in seed funding.
Sardine runs a service that alerts financial-technology companies of possible fraud when users open accounts or make transactions. It’s an issue startups in the industry have to deal with from day one, Ranjan said: He’s even seen fraudsters sign up for new services years in advance of a fintech company’s launch.
For founders just getting their companies out of the gate, that’s a real headache, he said. And in his view, it’s an issue that more startups may be grappling with as digital banking grows more popular and cryptocurrencies gain wider adoption.
“Our thesis is that every company will be a fintech company — unless fraud kills them first,” Ranjan said.
At launch, Sardine’s primary customers were crypto companies and neobanks. One of its early customers was MoonPay, a crypto-payments platform.
Ranjan launched Sardine alongside cofounders Aditya Goel and Zahid Shaikh. The trio worked together at Revolut, which runs a service that lets customers quickly transfer money across different currencies.
XYZ Venture Capital, which has a focus on fintech and enterprise companies, led Sardine’s seed round. Village Global — the early-stage fund backed by entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos — also participated, along with Coinbase Ventures and 11.2 Capital, which has also invested in the autonomous-vehicle company Cruise.
When asked about the startup’s out-of-the-gate valuation, Sardine declined to comment.
“Soups’ stellar reputation preceded him,” said Ross Fubini, XYZ Venture Capital’s founder and managing partner. “It was clear that he had not only surrounded himself with an excellent network of operators throughout his career as an extremely sophisticated fintech engineer, but that he also had the operational tools as a founder to build from the ground up in such a daunting space.”
Coinbase, where Ranjan was previously the director of data science and risk, has become a “breeding ground” for startup founders. The cryptocurrency exchange has its own venture arm — which has backed Sardine — and other former employees have gone on to start their own companies.
Indeed, Ranjan credited his time there with helping him to launch Sardine. “Coinbase was very much a crypto-startup university,” he said.