Soups Ranjan is co-founder and chief executive of Sardine, a behaviour-based risk platform that helps banks, fintechs and marketplaces stop fraud and money laundering. He is a machine learning engineer by training and has spent his whole career after graduate school fighting one kind of attack or another.
Cyber Threats, Click Fraud, Payments
He holds an undergraduate degree in computer science and a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Rice University, with a thesis on protecting web services from denial-of-service attacks. He spent about five years on cyber security for telecoms operators and about ten helping ad tech firms catch click fraud and bots, then turned to payment fraud.
Coinbase and Revolut
From 2015 to 2019 he was head of risk at Coinbase, where he built its machine learning fraud and identity systems. He then became head of financial crime at Revolut, building its fraud and compliance stack, and met the colleagues with whom he started Sardine in 2020, just before COVID hit.
A Data Science Problem
"We like to say that all fraud and scam problems are data science problems," he said on the Barefoot Innovation podcast in 2025. The answer lies in how a person types, swipes, scrolls and holds the phone during a payment. Sardine has more than 250 customers and has added credit risk to fraud and compliance. It raised a $70 million Series C in February 2025. It also helped create Sonar, a separate consortium for sharing data on fraudsters, and he wants US regulators to require every payment to check a counterparty against such a network, because banks hoard data while consumers get hurt.
He started out defending servers from floods of traffic. He now defends ordinary people from scammers on the other side of the world.
