A payments veteran who decided debt was worth the hard road
Tomás Campos has spent most of his career inside the machinery of how money moves. Long before Spinwheel, he was a consultant at Ernst & Young and later Cap Gemini, then took on point-of-sale, loyalty, payments and fuel technology work at Safeway. It was unglamorous plumbing, and it turned out to be the right training for someone who would later try to rewire an entire market.
The scale arrived at Blackhawk Network, where Campos ran the Mobile, Online and Emerging Businesses group. Under his watch the digital payments division grew into a $1.5 billion business. He then co-founded FluidM, a conversational commerce startup, and led it to an acquisition by Westfield Corp. After the deal he stayed on as Senior Vice President and Head of Product at Westfield Retail Solutions, steering retail and consumer initiatives at a company operating some of the busiest shopping centers in the world.
We believe this is an enormous opportunity that will outpace open banking.
Why debt, and why now
Campos started Spinwheel in 2019 after the consumer debt crisis touched his own family. That personal stake shaped the company's earliest focus: helping people see, understand, and reduce their debt, beginning with student loans. He brought along a partner he had built with for more than 16 years, Tushar Vaish, who became Spinwheel's co-founder and CTO. Their history stretched back through Blackhawk and FluidM - the kind of shorthand that only comes from surviving a few hard cycles together.
Timing helped. The CARES Act paused federal student loan payments, and the pause created a window. Rather than stay narrow, Campos and Vaish used it to widen Spinwheel from student loans into every major category of consumer debt: credit cards, auto loans, mortgages, and more.
Starting from the consumer, not the plumbing
Campos likes to describe his approach as first-principles thinking. Instead of building on top of existing infrastructure, he started with the person and worked backward. The observation that anchored everything: consumer liability accounts are fragmented and diverse, with most people holding somewhere between ten and fourteen credit accounts at once. Nobody had built a clean way to tie those together.
The technical answer was to kill the password. Spinwheel's credentialless approach connects a consumer's debt using just two data fields - a phone number and a date of birth - rather than brittle username-and-password logins that break constantly. On top of that connection layer, the team paired developer-first APIs with agentic AI, aiming to make debt as programmable and accessible as open banking made bank balances.
Funding trajectory
In June 2025, that vision drew real capital. Spinwheel closed a $30 million Series A led by F-Prime Capital, bringing its total reported funding to roughly $74.65 million. Investors framed the bet plainly. Writing about the round, Fika Ventures' Matt Hersh called the co-founders' work a first-principles approach to a broken system, and argued that Spinwheel was not just another credit API company but the start of a new category of consumer credit data and payments infrastructure.
How he builds teams
Ask Campos what he looks for in the people around him and he draws a sharp line. Talent, he says, is table stakes. What matters more is a combination of innovation, grit, and attitude - the temperament to navigate the messy, uncertain middle of building something from nothing. He talks openly about gratitude for his team and about a goal that is deliberately large: building a generational company that transforms consumer credit rather than a quick flip.
Talent is table stakes.
An opportunity that will outpace open banking.
Building a generational company transforming consumer credit.
The through-line
Read across his career and a pattern shows up. Campos keeps gravitating to the parts of finance and commerce that are unglamorous, technical, and quietly enormous - loyalty systems, digital gift cards, retail product, and now the tangled world of what people owe. He studied computer science at UC Berkeley and rounded out that training at the Haas School of Business, and the mix shows. He is comfortable talking about API design and about the emotional weight of debt in the same breath.
Spinwheel today reports serving more than 15 million users and 165 million accounts, with $1.5 trillion in connected debt flowing across its network. Whether it becomes the generational company Campos describes is still unwritten. What is clear is the shape of the wager: that the next great layer of fintech is not the money people have, but the money they owe - and that someone had to build the wiring to make it usable.