The data layer for autonomous finance

Based on his experiences at Mastercard, Marqeta, and Fidel API, Salman Syed, Astrada's Founder and CEO, saw an immense and underserved opportunity to build real-time spend data infrastructure. A small team set out to build proprietary connections with the major payment networks in 2024, focused on providing access to real-time data for expense management use cases.

Since launch, Astrada has achieved PCI DSS v4 Level 1 certification, joined Mastercard's StartPath accelerator, is a Visa Ventures portfolio company, and has been named to the DataTech 50. The platform has processed over 2.8 million transactions and $557M+ in card spend, with rapid adoption from enterprise resource planning providers to modern spend management platforms.

Expense management is being rebuilt around AI agents. Every major platform — from Brex and Ramp to SAP Concur and Coupa — is shipping autonomous features: auto-categorization, agent-driven reconciliation, real-time policy enforcement. The entire category is moving from "employee submits, manager reviews" to "agent handles it, human handles exceptions."

But these agents are being built on data infrastructure that was never designed for them. Open banking aggregators deliver data 24–48 hours late, cover only platform-issued cards (missing 40–60% of spend), and arrive with limited, inconsistently formatted fields. That was fine when humans reviewed expense reports three days later. It breaks when agents need to act at the speed of the transaction.

Real-time, complete, structured card transaction data — that gives agents something worth acting on. Data that arrives at the moment of the transaction, from every card an employee uses, with the fields machines need to categorize, reconcile, and enforce policy automatically.

That's why Astrada exists. Not because the shift to autonomous finance might happen someday, but because it's happening now — and the platforms building it are discovering that their data layer can't support what they're trying to build.