Spade has raised USD $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Oak HC/FT.
The round included both existing and new investors, among them Andreessen Horowitz, Flourish, Gradient, NAventures and Y Combinator.
The New York-based financial data company raised the funding as banks and fintech groups place greater emphasis on payments data quality and on systems that can identify the merchants behind card and ACH transactions.
Spade sells technology that matches raw transaction data to a verified merchant database. It says this helps financial institutions identify where a purchase took place, which business accepted the payment and what type of merchant was involved.
This has been a longstanding problem in payments infrastructure. Transaction records often contain incomplete or unclear merchant descriptors because data passes through several intermediaries across legacy rails. That makes it harder for banks and fintech apps to handle disputes, assign rewards accurately, analyse spending and detect suspicious activity.
Data focus
Many transaction enrichment providers rely on large volumes of transaction data and model-based cleansing to improve records. Spade instead starts with a merchant dataset and treats enrichment as a search-and-matching problem rather than a purely modelling task.
It says it matches transactions in real time to verified merchant records, then uses new transaction information to update its database. According to the company, the system delivers 99.9% coverage of US and Canadian merchants, accuracy above 99% and response times below 40 milliseconds at the 99th percentile.
Those figures matter because transaction data has become more than a back-office issue for many financial institutions. Banks increasingly want to use payments data in customer-facing and risk-related processes, including fraud checks, rewards, notifications, customer segmentation and lending offers.
Customers initially adopted Spade's product for enrichment, but now use it in workflows tied to authorisation decisions, fraud prevention, rewards attribution, spend analysis and marketing analysis.
Market shift
Spade linked the funding round to wider changes in financial services. It said artificial intelligence projects have pushed senior executives to examine data quality more closely, while cloud migration across banking has increased interest in using transaction data more effectively as a business asset.
The trend has also affected fintech groups that tried to build transaction enrichment systems in-house. According to Spade, some have spent heavily on internal tools with mixed results and are now reassessing whether to keep allocating capital to that work.
Oak HC/FT's lead role in the financing highlights continued investor interest in infrastructure companies serving banks and fintechs, particularly those focused on data layers, compliance tooling and workflow software. Andreessen Horowitz, Flourish and Y Combinator had already backed Spade, while the new round also included NAventures, the corporate venture arm of the National Bank of Canada.
Spade did not disclose its valuation. The funds will be used to expand its team, add merchant coverage and develop what it describes as an intelligence layer for payments data.
Wider use
The company's pitch reflects a broader push among fintech infrastructure providers to move closer to end-user outcomes. Rather than supplying a narrow API that customers must integrate into their own systems, many are trying to offer tools that support entire workflows.
For Spade, that means positioning its software not just as a way to clean up merchant records, but as a system that can support real-time rewards attribution, push-notification triggers, behavioural segmentation, loan targeting and fraud flagging.
Competition in the field remains active, with banks, card networks, fintechs and specialist vendors all trying to improve the clarity and usefulness of transaction data. But poor merchant information remains common across the industry, particularly where older payment infrastructure still shapes how data is captured and shared.
Spade said more than a trillion transactions take place each year and argued that the underlying data standards have changed little in more than 50 years, leaving financial institutions with a large but imperfect source of information.
"The world has changed since 2021, and the timing of this raise reflects that," the company said.