National Bank of Canada has entered a multi-year partnership with Sardine, an agentic risk platform focused on combating financial crime, alongside leading a $25m Series C extension round in the company.
The investment takes Sardine’s total funding to $170m. Under the terms of the commercial arrangement, National Bank of Canada will roll out Sardine’s device intelligence and real-time risk scoring capabilities across its retail, commercial, and wealth operations. The bank’s participation in the funding round was made through NAventures, its corporate venture capital arm.
The partnership emerged from a live evaluation in which Sardine’s platform demonstrated measurable improvements in fraud detection whilst cutting false positive rates — reducing unnecessary friction for customers in the process. The bank had already held an existing stake in Sardine prior to this latest round.
Sardine offers financial institutions an AI-driven platform designed to detect and prevent financial crime without hampering the experience of legitimate customers. The company has been expanding its footprint across the financial services sector, with growing adoption among banks and wealth managers as the industry moves towards more scalable, technology-led approaches to risk management.
NAventures partner Joshuah Lebacq said, “After closely following Sardine’s growth and hearing strong feedback from existing customers, we decided to conduct an extensive evaluation of their platform. The results gave us confidence to make Sardine a strong addition to our financial crime prevention operations and expand our commercial relationship.”
Lebacq added, “We’re excited about the potential of agentic AI, especially in the risk and compliance sphere, and Sardine’s financial crime agents are setting the standard for the category.”
Sardine CEO and co-founder Soups Ranjan said, “Sardine was built for banks that need to stop fraud without slowing down their loyal customers. National Bank of Canada is one of the most respected financial institutions in North America, and we’re proud to support their financial crime operations as they continue to set the standard for digital banking in Canada.”
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