Founders Everywhere: Tess Bloch
Tess Bloch is the co-founder and COO of Spade, the data and AI platform for modern finance.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
Making data make sense is one of the biggest challenges in modern finance. Financial institutions process millions of transactions every day, from card swipes and online checkouts to recurring subscriptions and bank transfers. But much of that data is messy, inconsistent, and difficult to use. Spade brings clarity to that complexity by enriching transaction data in real time by adding structure, accuracy, and intelligence at every layer. Spade helps banks and fintechs better understand transactions, reduce fraud, and deliver smarter customer experiences. They recently raised a $40 million Series B to deliver a full data and AI platform for payments intelligence, expand the team and meet growing demand from financial institutions and fintechs that rely on Spade’s foundational enhanced transaction data to power AI initiatives. They are currently hiring, so check out their careers page if you want to join the team building the platform that will define the future of finance.
Co-founder and COO Tess Bloch, brings a deep operational background in fintech. Her path into the industry began early, when she cold-emailed Venmo as a college freshman and landed an internship at the fast-growing payments company. She even took time off from school to work there full-time, an experience that laid the foundation of her career in financial technology. After graduating, she joined McKinsey, where she focused on payments, followed by a brief stint in politics, before moving to Pinwheel and helping scale the team from 10 to 100. It was there that a mentor introduced her to co-founder and CEO Oban MacTavish, who was solving a problem she’d seen throughout her career: poor-quality transaction data slowing innovation. Tess took on her first founding role and helped create the team that now enriches billions of transactions each month for category-defining fintechs and Fortune 500 banks.
What’s Spade’s North Star?
Our North Star is to become the default intelligence layer for transaction data. We have two core pieces: our best-in-class merchant metadata layer and our data and AI platform, which helps financial institutions use that data across use cases like AI, analytics, authorization decisioning, and user experience. Ultimately, every financial institution and fintech that touches transaction data should rely on Spade as foundational infrastructure.
Tell us about a recent milestone that Spade crushed.
We recently closed our $40 million Series B, led by Oak HC/FT, with Andreessen Horowitz, Flourish Ventures, Gradient Ventures, NA Ventures, and Y Combinator participating. Leading up to that, we saw 470% year-over-year growth and reached 1.9 billion transactions processed daily, so it’s been a period of pretty massive scale.
What’s on the horizon for Spade?
We’re focused on expanding beyond transaction enrichment into a full data and AI platform for payments intelligence. AI-driven processes are the direction the industry is moving in, but those systems are only as good as the data underneath them, so I think Spade is going to become the default data and intelligence layer that makes that transition possible. It’s really the first step for every financial institution on an AI journey. We’re growing fast and looking to double our headcount this year. We’re hiring across the board so check out our careers page!
How has your background influenced your approach to building Spade?
I come from an operator background, so I never expected to become a founder. I used to associate founders with a “win at all costs” mindset that glorified burnout and a 9-9-6 culture, which never aligned with how I wanted to lead. That perspective has shaped me deeply: I believe empathy is a competitive advantage, and it informs how I hire, make decisions, and build our culture. I don’t believe in compromising on values to hit numbers. I feel incredibly lucky to be building the kind of company I always wanted to see: one rooted in care, ambition, and sustainability, alongside people I deeply respect and want to keep growing with.
Any favorite books?
I love The Field Guide to Global Payments by Sophia Goldberg. She’s another fintech founder and she’s amazing. We give it to all new team members, so I definitely want to plug that.
Fun fact:
I worked as a field organizer in Iowa on Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign in 2019. It was the hardest job I’ve ever had, and it gave me a firsthand perspective on what it’s like to live in places where access to healthcare, banks, and financial resources is more limited.
From the archives! Listen to Venture Everywhere podcast episode 12: Radicle Proof in the Pudding on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and explore all our past episodes here!
