Investing in Sardine

By Tom Brown | Feb 10, 2022 | 12:39 PM ET

At Nyca, we view our job as finding companies led by people who have the qualities necessary to turn a glimmer of an idea into a revenue generating machine and persuading them to let us invest in them. We believe that Soups, Aditya, and Zahid are such people and Sardine is that idea. We have that conviction, in part, because of the qualities that Soups has displayed across his career. He is a builder of products and teams. He has experienced explosive growth first-hand, multiple times. That experience is invaluable.

We also have that conviction because of how Sardine articulates its vision for the future of its business. Soups and team recognize that there is no single point solution to eliminating fraud. Fraud is an inevitable by-product of the human condition. Wherever gains can be had from breaking rules, some people will devote their time to breaking those rules. Soups and his co-founders have built a team that invests in identifying new patterns of misbehavior and then devises new tools and techniques to combat it.

Today, Sardine is helping to bridge the gap between the archaic payment infrastructure in the U.S. and the real time expectations of the consumers and firms. The US payment infrastructure essentially requires funds to come to rest at one financial institution before they can be moved to another. In an increasingly real time world, this delay is a significant pain point for every bank, broker -dealer, crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, a host of other firms. Sardine relieves this pain by fishing out the fraud.

But our excitement in Sardine is not confined to the limits of today’s payment infrastructure. Even when funds and other assets can settle in real time, fraud will remain a problem. Firms will still need to answer a host of questions: (1) is the person or firm seeking to open an account who they purport to be; (2) do they have the permission associated with the external account that they claim to have; and (3) will they seek to repudiate the transaction if they don’t like the outcome. We believe that Sardine will be helping firms to answer these questions for years to come.