Spade Secures $40M to Build AI's Data Backbone for Modern Finance

NEW YORK, NY – March 24, 2026 – Spade, a financial technology firm specializing in transaction data, today announced it has closed a $40 million Series B funding round. The investment, led by prominent fintech and healthcare venture firm Oak HC/FT, signals strong market confidence in the company's mission to provide the foundational data layer for an increasingly AI-driven financial industry.

The round saw participation from a formidable syndicate of investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Flourish, Google's AI-focused fund Gradient, NAventures (the corporate venture arm of National Bank of Canada), and the influential startup accelerator Y Combinator. Spade plans to use the capital to accelerate its platform development, expand its team, and meet the surging demand from banks and fintechs for its data enrichment services.

The New Bedrock of Digital Finance

At the heart of Spade's value proposition is a solution to a problem as old as digital banking: messy, indecipherable transaction data. Every day, financial institutions process billions of card swipes, ACH transfers, and wire payments. The raw data strings generated—like "AMZNMKTPLACE" or "SQC*TENT COFFEE 123"—are often cryptic, leading to customer confusion, costly disputes, and a missed opportunity to understand consumer behavior.

Spade’s platform tackles this issue head-on. Founded in 2021, the company has built a proprietary database and an advanced AI-powered matching engine that transforms these raw records into structured, verified merchant intelligence in real-time. By matching transaction data against its vast repository, Spade can tell a financial institution exactly where and with whom a customer spent their money.

The company's performance claims are a key part of its enterprise appeal. Spade asserts 99.9% coverage of all U.S. and Canadian merchants with over 99% accuracy. Crucially, for real-time applications like payment authorizations, its API infrastructure delivers this enriched data with a P99 latency of under 40 milliseconds, making it one of the fastest solutions on the market. This speed and accuracy directly translate to a better customer experience, enabling clearer statements, more effective budgeting tools, and a reduction in calls to customer service centers.

Fueling the AI Revolution in Banking

While cleaning up transaction data is a significant achievement, Spade's ambition—and the reason for its substantial new funding—lies in its role as a critical enabler for the next wave of financial technology: Artificial Intelligence. The financial services industry is projected to spend hundreds of billions on AI, seeking to automate operations, enhance fraud detection, and deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences. However, the efficacy of any AI model is fundamentally limited by the quality of the data it is fed.

This is where Spade positions itself as essential infrastructure. "As AI adoption accelerates, banks can only move toward fully automated, agentic workflows if those systems are built on detailed, verified, and structured consumer behavior powered by enriched transaction data," said Oban MacTavish, cofounder and CEO of Spade, in the funding announcement. "Spade delivers just that.”

By providing a clean, consistent, and granular data feed—including precise geolocation and verified merchant categories that go beyond outdated MCC codes—Spade provides the fuel for advanced AI applications. For example, fraud detection models can operate more effectively with enriched data during the authorization process. Banks can build sophisticated personalization engines that offer relevant rewards and insights based on a true understanding of a customer's spending habits. More than 85% of Spade’s current customers, which include industry leaders like Stripe, Bilt, and Mercury, already use the platform for multiple mission-critical workflows, embedding it deeply within their operations.

Investor Confidence in 'Invisible Infrastructure'

The $40 million investment is a powerful endorsement of the growing market for "invisible infrastructure"—the foundational technologies that power the user-facing apps and services people use every day. The caliber of investors, from fintech specialists like Oak HC/FT and Flourish to the AI-focused Gradient, underscores a broad belief in Spade's approach and market position.

"Spade has emerged as the clear breakout winner in the merchant intelligence category by focusing on data quality," noted Allen Miller, a Partner at lead investor Oak HC/FT. He pointed to the company's "comprehensive merchant coverage, industry-leading accuracy and sub-50ms response times" as evidence of its best-in-class product.

This investor confidence is backed by remarkable growth metrics. In the past year, Spade reported 470% year-over-year revenue growth and scaled its systems to process as many as 1.9 billion transactions daily. This proven ability to perform at an enterprise scale is crucial for attracting large financial institutions and high-growth fintechs. For clients like the popular rewards platform Bilt, Spade's hyper-local attribution is the key to powering its personalized rewards program. For a global payments giant like Stripe, Spade provides critical enriched merchant data.

Navigating a Complex and Competitive Landscape

Spade operates within a competitive arena that includes established financial data aggregators like Plaid and MX. However, its intense focus on the quality, speed, and real-time nature of transaction enrichment for mission-critical use cases serves as a key differentiator. While others may focus on connecting accounts, Spade's core competency is making the data from those accounts instantly intelligent and actionable.

The company's future growth will also require navigating a complex regulatory environment. As a processor of sensitive financial information, Spade must remain vigilant about data privacy laws like the GDPR and CCPA, ensuring robust governance and security are at the forefront of its operations. The challenge for the industry is to share insights that prevent fraud and improve services while rigorously protecting individual privacy.

With the new capital, Spade plans to evolve beyond data enrichment to offer a full "payments intelligence platform." The vision is to empower customers to not just receive clean data, but to build, manage, and automate entire workflows on top of it. This could include creating rules for personalized rewards, identifying transactions that require immediate customer notifications, or segmenting users for targeted financial advice. By moving up the value chain from data provider to intelligence partner, Spade aims to become an indispensable component of the modern financial ecosystem.