We’ve all looked at credit card statements and seen reference numbers, which are just strings of letters, numbers, and symbols that don’t mean much to the average consumer.
Most of the time, your statement will show the place of purchase and company name, but what if the company name on your statement doesn’t match your receipt? For a company coordinating a hundred statements, it can lead to hours of detective play.
The United States processed over $124 billion in credit and debit card transactions in 2020. So what if there was an easier way to decipher that string of data? That’s what Spade is working on.
Founded in 2021 by Oban MacTavish and Cooper Hart, the company is developing a data-backed transactional enrichment API that turns that bad data into real-time merchant, category and location details.
“It basically started with creating a logo for the transaction,” MacTavish told TechCrunch. “It quickly snowballed, so we talked about easily consolidating layers on top of bank data to make it even better.”
Spade’s technology “cleans” the data, enriching it with a unique first-party dataset that matches transactions to real merchant identities, logos, hours of operation and spending history, giving businesses a complete picture of their purchases We will make it possible, says MacTavish.
“It basically started with creating a company logo for the trade,” says MacTavish. “It quickly snowballed, so we talked about easily consolidating layers on top of bank data to make it even better.”
Spade founders Oban McTavish and Cooper Hart. Image credit: spade
With the enhanced data, Spade’s customers, including card issuers, anti-fraud platforms and neo-banks, can implement spend management, improve anti-fraud models, and more.
“Computers can now build a system on top of the data properly because it’s not just a clean merchant name, but a consistent ID number across all versions of the merchant,” added MacTavish. rice field. “We can also know if a merchant is fraudulent for some reason, which is really not possible today without better data. That’s where we come in.”
Spade is currently backed by $5 million in seed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. Participating in the round were Y Combinator, Gradient Ventures, Dash Fund and a group of angel investors from Square, Alloy, Coinbase, MANTL and Venmo. In total, the company has raised $6.1 million for him.
MacTavish intends to use much of the money for recruitment. Until recently, it was just him and his Hart, but now there are 10 of him on the team. Also, the company now has a number of runways to purchase and negotiate data acquisition contracts, he said.
MacTavish said Spade was profitable, but after launching the card issuer’s product last October, he said this year’s “first quarter was our biggest quarter yet” and that I declined to comment further. He also said the company is now focusing more on growing its revenues now that its products have reached a good position.
“We are confident that we are in a very strong position on the product and have a team that can scale,” added MacTavish. “Historically, we have worked with mid-sized companies and start-ups, but in practice we are very active on the mid-market side, and also on the large enterprise side. We can move on to the next stage of growth.”
