The LSE Directory / Alternative data
Facteus is a Portland, Oregon based alternative data company that converts real-world US consumer credit and debit card transactions into privacy-compliant, analytics-ready datasets. It sources data directly from more than 20 banks, credit unions and fintech partners, covering over 185 million active cards, and states it tracks more than $1.6 trillion in annual US consumer spending across more than 5 million merchant locations and over 2.2 million SKUs. Its product line includes Cube (a pre-aggregated, analytics-ready transaction dataset), Cube Insights (a spending dashboard), Arbiter (a balanced transaction panel delivered on roughly a one-day lag, used for company-level forecasting and benchmarking), Ultra (a row-level raw transaction feed) and Onyx (SKU-level retail sales data across hardline and softline categories), plus a Fundamental Research Dashboard that applies the Arbiter panel to public and private company performance tracking. The company differentiates on data provenance: transactions are sourced directly from card-issuing banks and credit unions rather than inferred from location, web-traffic or search signals, which it markets as ground-truth spend visibility rather than a proxy signal. Its customer base spans institutional investors and hedge funds using the data for revenue nowcasting, corporate strategy and competitive-intelligence teams benchmarking market share, retailers and consumer brands tracking SKU-level sell-through, and marketing agencies measuring campaign response. A March 2022 investment from Curql Fund, the venture arm of a collective of more than 75 US credit unions, gave Facteus access to tens of millions of additional cards from Curql's credit-union owners, a distribution channel distinct from the bank-only panels common among some transaction-data peers. Facteus was founded in 2010 in the Portland, Oregon area as ARM Insight, working with more than 1,000 financial institutions and payments companies before rebranding to Facteus in March 2020 under then CEO Randy Koch. Co-founder Chris Marsh serves as CEO today; Jonathan Chin is also cited in company materials as a co-founder. The company raised $10 million in March 2022 in a round led by Curql Fund. The independent industry directory AlternativeData.org lists Facteus at roughly 35 employees serving between 10 and 50 discretionary asset-manager clients as of its most recent listing, a smaller figure than the company's own consumer-facing scale claims suggest. Facteus is registered as a data broker under Texas law, as required of companies handling this class of consumer data. In April 2024, portfolio-analytics platform Exabel integrated Facteus's Arbiter dataset, extending its coverage to more than 600 publicly traded North American companies for fundamental investment teams. Recent output leans toward applied spend-data research and investment use cases. An October 2025 press release reported that independent testing by data-evaluation firm Maiden Century found a 76 percent market-neutral alpha improvement using Facteus's Arbiter card-level data across more than 400 tickers on a one-day lag, and the company's 2025-2026 published research has covered quick-service-restaurant discount trends, convenience-store and restaurant category convergence, and merchant growth rankings. This positions Facteus today primarily as an investment-research and retail-intelligence data source, with less public emphasis than in earlier years on the synthetic-data and data-enrichment tooling it previously marketed under the Mimic name.
