Dive Brief:

• Data fintech Spade is pursuing big bank card issuers as clients after recently raising more venture capital, CEO and co-founder Oban MacTavish said this week.
• The New York-based startup, which counts Andreessen Horowitz and Flourish Ventures among its investors, announced $10 million in investments earlier this month. That brings Spade’s total capital raised to $16.1 million, MacTavish said. Spade provides detailed merchant data to card issuers.
• “This round of funding that just happened is really to help us push into the true banking ecosystem,” he said during an interview. Spade currently counts fintechs Ramp, Sardine, Unit and Mercury among its clients. MacTavish declined to comment on how many customers Spade has.

Dive Insight:

Spade, founded in 2021, provides data designed to help customers authorize more transactions and stop fraud, MacTavish said. The startup aims to be additive to the information card networks are providing during transactions, which “allows our customers to make far more informed payment decisions,” he said.

“What we do is we take those very standardized fields that are coming out of the networks, and we augment them with dramatically better information in real-time,” he said. That includes geolocation and consistent identification across merchants, he said.

Part of Spade’s pitch is speed, and the startup strives to send enhanced transaction information to card issuers faster than its competitors, MacTavish said. In general data improvement scenarios, Spade’s rivals include Plaid, MX Technologies, Entropy and Heron Data, he said. 

In the coming year, Spade plans to grow beyond its current fintech client roster and move up the ranks, targeting big banks in the U.S., said MacTavish, who co-founded the company with Tess Bloch and Cooper Hart. 

The company currently has 13 employees. MacTavish expects that figure to grow “pretty substantially” over the next year as the startup hires for machine learning, data science and customer success-related roles. He didn’t specify a target headcount.

In the coming year, Spade is seeking to expand beyond the U.S., potentially in the U.K., Mexico, Latin America and Canada, he said. “As our customers have grown, so have their demands for transactions to be enriched overseas,” he said.