Cardless just turned the quiet grind of credit cards into something worth talking about. The San Francisco fintech closed a $60M Series C led by Spark Capital, with Activant Capital, Industry Ventures, and Pear VC doubling down. That brings their total raise to more than $170M, a long way from a $200,000 pre-seed back in 2019. The company was founded by Stanford engineering alumni Michael Spelfogel and Scott Kazmierowicz, who saw an industry bloated with legacy banks and built something sharper, faster, and entirely brand-first.
Michael Spelfogel carved his expertise at Visa in commercial cards, ran data science at Lyft and Rent the Runway, and even shaped loyalty strategy at The Points Guy. Scott Kazmierowicz combined Goldman Sachs engineering with investment banking at Allen & Company, giving him both technical edge and financial fluency. Together, they designed Cardless to let companies build and run their own co-branded credit cards, embedded directly inside apps and websites, without surrendering customer relationships to third parties.
The results are loud. Annualized revenue hit $15 million in Q2 2025 and is projected to top $150 million by Q2 2026. Transaction volume tripled over the past year. Cardholder numbers doubled in six months. Revenue grew more than 10x since early 2023. Premium Cardless-powered products average nearly 20 swipes a month, meaning they are not second wallets, they are the wallet. When a 50-person team can outpace the old guard’s 18-month launch cycles with 90-day deployments, it is no wonder brands are lining up.
And the brands are real. Bilt, Coinbase, Qatar Airways, Alibaba, LATAM Airlines, Avianca, TAP Air Portugal, the Cleveland Cavaliers, Manchester United, and Simon Property Group all chose Cardless to rewire how their customers spend. This is not a lab experiment. It is a global network of airlines, sports teams, retailers, and fintechs proving the platform works. Supporting Visa, Mastercard, and American Express, Cardless even issues Visa Infinite products, a territory few fintechs touch.
The $60 million will scale card programs, grow the team, and expand into retail, ecommerce, and small business markets. Bilt Technologies will roll out three new Cardless-backed products in 2026. Leadership has been reinforced with Wells Fargo veteran Joe Wold heading partnerships and compliance powerhouse Ailien Phan joining from Robinhood. That blend of growth, discipline, and engineering speed is exactly what drew Spark Capital, already an investor in Slack, Twitter, and Coinbase, to lead the round.
The lesson is simple: Cardless is not chasing the credit card business. They are shifting who owns it. Brands keep the data, the loyalty, and the relationship. Customers get rewards that actually matter and approvals that feel instant. Banks get a wake-up call. In the embedded finance game, moving slow is not safe, it is fatal.
