Spade Powers the Future of Financial Data Infrastructure

Spade, the data and AI platform for modern finance, led by Oban MacTavish, Tess Bloch, and the team, 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.

While transaction volumes have surged, the underlying data infrastructure has remained largely unchanged for decades, leaving key details incomplete or inaccurate due to misaligned incentives across payment networks. This results in poor user experiences, high dispute rates, and limited data utility.

Spade addresses this by enriching raw transaction data, matching it to verified businesses to provide clear, accurate insights into each transaction. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on noisy model-based cleansing, the platform focuses on fundamentally improving data quality at its source.

Spade takes a fundamentally different approach, treating transaction enrichment as a search problem built on verified merchant data rather than model-based cleansing. Transactions are matched in real time to a proprietary database, which is continuously improved through usage.

This approach delivers 99.9% coverage of US and Canadian merchants with over 99% accuracy and sub-40ms speeds, enabling critical use cases such as authorization, fraud prevention, rewards attribution, and analytics, positioning Spade as a provider of merchant intelligence rather than simple data cleaning.

A structural shift is underway in payments data. What was once a persistent but overlooked issue has become a top priority, driven by AI-led investments in data quality and widespread cloud adoption across financial institutions. As banks recognize transaction data as a strategic asset and fintechs reassess costly in-house solutions, demand for effective enrichment has reached an inflection point.

Spade is evolving from a transaction enrichment API into a full data and AI platform, as customer needs shift from enriched data to end-to-end workflow solutions. The platform now supports use cases such as real-time rewards attribution, behavioral segmentation, fraud detection, and targeted lending, moving from a component to a core solution.

The Series B will accelerate this transition by expanding the team, enhancing merchant coverage, and building an intelligence layer that converts payment data into actionable outcomes.