Lithic

Before Lithic, we started Privacy.com in 2014 to build the safest and easiest way for consumers to pay online. We worked with a legacy issuer processor and it took us over a year to launch our card program. Even after we were up and running, scaling and ongoing maintenance were a pain—batch processing delays, scheduled downtime windows, and black-box systems we couldn't debug.

From this experience, we learned firsthand that the financial services supply chain is broken—in the United States, the industry is still dominated by 30-year-old companies that run on mainframes.

So we built Lithic, the issuing and processing infrastructure we always wanted, with developer-friendly, modern, well-documented APIs, insanely fast speed-to-market, and flawless reconciliation—purpose built to give card issuers extremely high levels of observability, control, and flexibility over their card programs. We own the entire technical stack: direct connections to Visa, Mastercard, and Amex, our own authorization engine delivering sub-100ms responses, an immutable ledger system, and real-time webhooks for every transaction event.

Today, we power card programs for 100+ innovative companies including Mercury and Privacy.com—maintaining 99.99+% uptime without maintenance windows while processing billions in payment volume. And we're just getting started.

Lithic currently has 150+ employees in 26 states and 6 countries, with an HQ in NYC, backed by Bessemer, Index, and Stripes.