Spade Expands Financial Data Platform Following $40M Series B

Financial institutions process billions of card, ACH, and wire transactions daily across payment rails established decades ago. The data transmitted over these networks—typically limited to 40 to 50 characters of cryptic text—routinely strips out merchant identity, geographic location, and business category. Spade was founded in 2021 to resolve that information deficit, translating low-quality transaction strings into verified merchant profiles in real time.

In March 2026, Spade raised a $40 million Series B funding round led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Flourish Ventures, Gradient Ventures, NAventures, and Y Combinator. The raise brought Spade’s total venture funding to $56.1 million, following 470% year-over-year revenue growth and daily peak processing volumes of 1.9 billion transactions. Customers relying on its merchant data infrastructure include Stripe, Mercury, Bilt, Ramp, Unit, and Sardine.

Reframing Enrichment as a Search Problem

Traditional approaches to transaction enrichment try to clean raw payment descriptors using machine learning models trained directly on incoming transaction text. As CEO Oban MacTavish explained in an interview with In Control with Natasha Vernier, that approach struggles because payment networks transmit truncated descriptor fields—such as ISO 8583 data elements DE42 and DE43—where merchant names are frequently misspelled, point-of-sale terminals are reassigned, or online merchant locations list customer service phone numbers instead of physical addresses.

Spade instead treats enrichment as a search and retrieval problem. The company built an independent merchant graph covering 99.9% of payment-accepting businesses in the United States and Canada, aggregating state corporate registries, point-of-interest data, first-party inputs, and issuer feedback. Incoming transaction strings are matched in real time against this database, returning verified merchant identities, normalized categories, logos, and precise geolocations.

According to reportage from AlleyWatch, the system operates with greater than 99% accuracy and a P99 latency under 40 milliseconds. That speed allows card issuers and banks to evaluate transactions before authorization, reducing false declines and improving fraud detection models by more than 15%, as reported by TechCrunch. The technical stack underpinning the API runs on AWS Serverless, PostgreSQL, Python, Django, PySpark, and proprietary NLP models.

Leadership and Market Strategy

Spade was founded by Oban MacTavish, who serves as chief executive officer, and Cooper Hart, who serves as chief technology officer. Before Spade, MacTavish served as Head of Business Strategy and Finance at Hubly, a vertical SaaS platform for registered investment advisors, after earning a commerce degree from the UBC Sauder School of Business.

At industry conferences like FinovateFall 2026, covered by Finovate, MacTavish outlined why transaction data quality is critical for banking software. In a discussion on Finovate TV, he noted that standard large language models struggle with transaction feeds because financial records are composed of non-standard abbreviations and numbers rather than natural language. Spade is positioning its structured database as the operational substrate for automated workflows, agentic AI systems, and personalized financial products across retail and commercial banking.

Expansion into Enterprise Banking

Spade operates out of an office in New York's Flatiron district alongside remote team members across the United States and Canada. The company is actively expanding its product, sales, and engineering teams to support a client base shifting from fintech startups toward large card issuers and Tier 1 banks.

On the product and data side, Spade is hiring a Product Manager - Agent Platform ($185,000–$220,000) to build the console and platform connecting Spade’s products for customers, and a Product Manager - Enrichment ($185,000–$220,000) to lead improvements across the core enrichment engine. Evaluating data quality across card and ACH rails is managed by roles like the Product Performance Analyst ($135,000–$155,000).

Engineering efforts focus on both platform scale and security. Spade is recruiting a remote Data Scientist - AI/ML (Mid & Sr Levels) ($175,000–$225,000) to build real-time ML systems running on merchant and transaction datasets. Securing bank-facing edge architecture is handled by a Senior Platform Security Engineer ($210,000–$240,000), who manages certificate lifecycles, network security architecture, and vulnerability management. Application development is supported by a hybrid New York Fullstack Engineer (Mid-Level) ($170,000–$200,000) working in React, TypeScript, Python, and Django, as well as a remote Backend Engineer (Mid-Level) ($170,000–$200,000).

Commercial roles reflect an aggressive enterprise push. Sales openings include an Account Executive - Enterprise Banks ($300,000–$400,000) managing pipeline strategy for large institutional banks, an Account Executive - Fintech ($250,000–$300,000), and an Account Executive - Mid-Market ($230,000–$300,000) focused on regional banks and credit unions. Outbound prospecting is anchored by an SDR/BDR - Enterprise ($110,000–$150,000) setting outbound playbooks for top-tier financial institutions, while retention is supported by an Account Manager - Enterprise ($200,000–$250,000) managing accounts representing $2 million to $5 million in ARR.

Open Roles at Spade

See all open roles at Spade