Spiral, the pioneer of Impact-as-a-Service™, announced today a $28M Series A investment, bringing total funding to $42M. The round was led by Team8 with additional funding from Euclidean Capital and Intuition Fund, Communitas Capital, Phoenix, and Nidoco AB.
The company will use the funding to launch its Impact-as-a-Service™ platform and expand its offerings to more than 10,000 financial institutions across the U.S., including banks, credit unions, and fintech companies. The investment will be used to grow its first-of-its-kind platform that helps banks and other financial institutions to easily embed sustainability, social impact, ESG, and CSR into their core businesses to empower millions of their customers to achieve daily impact and contribute to a better world.
Spiral was founded in 2019 and led by fintech entrepreneur Shawn Melamed, a former Managing Director of Morgan Stanley’s Technology Business Development and Innovation Offices. Initially, Spiral was developed to help people and nonprofits drive tangible environmental and social impact through everyday banking products. As its first impact-driven product, the company launched a socially responsible consumer banking app in 2021, which grew to +65,000 customers and $65 million in transactions in less than a year.
The early success illustrates the urgency in which banks and credit unions need to incorporate access to impact-driven and ESG-forward banking and demonstrates how offerings like this tremendously help with customer acquisition, engagement, and retention. Spiral has since transitioned to a B2B model in order to provide access to this technology to all financial institutions. By empowering any bank or credit union customer, Spiral has a unique opportunity to drive more donations to the 1.5 million nonprofits in the U.S.
“After launching our own mission-driven consumer banking app and witnessing its rapid growth, we saw that rather than offering an independent banking app, the greatest value would be to partner with other financial institutions. We decided to make our technology accessible to help more people and businesses make an impact easily using their current banking and financial apps,” said Shawn Melamed, Co-founder and CEO of Spiral. “We realized that our innovative impact products are game-changer differentiators for banks, credit unions, and financial institutions that want to lead the market and give back to their communities while increasing their revenues and expanding their customer base.”
Spiral helps banks and credit unions increase revenue through higher engagement and increased spending with their cards and create socially responsible debit cards, credit cards, accounts, and payment products. In addition, Spiral seamlessly handles all the required underlying back-office operations, donation processing, compliance, and technical integrations with charities. With Spiral, banking customers at all income levels can easily make an impact through everyday purchases, round-up card transactions, monthly charitable giving subscriptions, and tax-deductible donor-advised funds for long-term charitable giving.