Spade’s Series B: Owning the Data Layer for Financial Services
By Oban MacTavish and Tess Bloch· 3/24/2026 · 3 min read
Today, we’re announcing that Spade has raised a $40M Series B led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Flourish, Gradient, NAventures (National Bank of Canada’s corporate venture arm), and Y Combinator. We’re proud of the milestone, but the raise isn’t the story. The story is what’s happening in payments, why it’s happening now, and why Spade is uniquely positioned to own what comes next.
The problem hasn’t changed. The stakes have.
Over a trillion transactions happen annually – but the data underlying those transactions hasn’t meaningfully changed in over 50 years. Every card swipe or ACH transfer is the result of half a dozen businesses passing bits and bytes of data across rails built in the 1970s. Basic details – the actual name of the business, where the transaction happened, what type of purchase it was – are routinely missing or wrong. The reason this persists is structural: the parties involved have conflicting incentives, and none of them are focused on fixing data quality. They’re focused on moving volume.
Without enrichment, transaction strings are often indecipherable, leading to high dispute volumes, poor user experiences, weak reward attribution, and an inability to effectively leverage the data asset. Spade’s platform solves this by matching raw data to verified businesses in its proprietary database, allowing customers to understand exactly where and with whom a transaction occurred.
“Transaction enrichment” as a category has existed for years. When we started Spade in late 2021, we weren’t the first to try to solve it. But every incumbent and every startup was approaching it the same way: ingest massive amounts of transactions, train models on the noise, repeat. The problem with that approach is fundamental. If model-based cleansing worked, the card networks and largest banks in the world would already have perfect transaction data. They don’t.
Why we’re different – and why it matters more now than ever
Spade was built on a different premise: we’re a data company at heart. We started with a view of businesses and verified merchant data, and treated enrichment less like a cleansing problem and more like a search problem. We take transactions, match them in real time to a verified merchant database, and use transaction data not to train a model – but to hydrate and improve that database further.
The result: a best-in-class solution, delivering 99.9% coverage of US and Canadian merchants with >99%+ accuracy at unparalleled speeds (<40ms p99). This performance unlocked a range of use cases our competitors had never considered supporting. Customers came to us for authorization decisions, fraud prevention, rewards attribution, spend analytics, marketing analytics – workflows that were historically considered too mission-critical for something that looked like data cleaning. But Spade doesn’t do data cleaning – we provide merchant intelligence.
Something has shifted
The world has changed since 2021, and the timing of this raise reflects that.
For years, payments data was a known problem that never quite made it onto the C-suite’s agenda. That’s over. AI is driving top-down investment in data quality across every financial institution on the planet. Every bank, well beyond the obvious top 20, is completing a cloud transition and waking up to the value of their transaction data as a strategic asset. The fintechs that sunk tens of millions of dollars trying to solve enrichment in-house are looking at mediocre results and recognizing it’s not the best use of their capital.
We’re at an inflection point, where market demand has truly become structural.
From enrichment to platform
We’ve always been the trusted stewards of our customers’ payments data. What’s changed is what they need us to do with it.
Customers no longer just want enriched data passed back. They want a platform that helps them build and manage workflows that solve real business problems end-to-end.
Spade is rapidly evolving from an enrichment API, to a data and AI platform that enables our customers to do more with our data, faster. Customers no longer simply rely on us to enrich data and pass it back. They leverage our platform to enable use cases from real-time rewards attribution, push notification triggers, behavioral segmentation, loan targeting, fraud flagging. Our product is no longer a component of someone else’s solution – it’s becoming the solution itself.
This Series B allows us to accelerate that transition: expanding our team, deepening our merchant coverage, and building the intelligence layer that transforms raw payments data into outcomes.
We’re just getting started. If you want to see what real-time merchant intelligence can unlock for your business, reach out at sales@spade.com. And if you’re interested in joining us, check out our jobs board.