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 a card program. Even after we were up and running, scaling and ongoing maintenance were a pain.

From this experience, we learned first hand 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.

Today, we power card programs for dozens of innovative fintechs—and we’re just getting started.

Backed by industry leading investors

Built to Last

PCI-DSS Compliant

SOC 2 Type 2 Certified

Strong Bank Partnerships

Direct to Mastercard

Direct to Visa

Mastercard Certified

Visa Certified

Visa TPA Program (ISO-PP)

Visa TPA Program (ISO-C)

Featured

Published

GGV Capital Fintech Innovation Top 50, 2023 & 2024

Tearsheet Embedded Awards Best Card Issuing Platform, 2022

CB Insights Fintech Top 250, 2022

Come change the game for payments with us

Careers at Lithic

Infallible infrastructure for always-on availability

A modular, extensible card issuing and processing stack that gives you the transparency, flexibility, and control to design your best payments program.

Our story

From virtual card issuing to infrastructure provider

Our journey began in 2014 when we founded Privacy in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, providing consumers with safe, single-use virtual cards to pay online. We quickly realized as we grew that the legacy issuer processor we used was not equipped to support our product vision—it took over a year to launch, not to mention the pain of ongoing maintenance and scaling.

From this experience, we learned first hand 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. A modern, developer-friendly issuer processing platform with well-documented APIs, insanely fast speed-to-market, and flawless reconciliation through direct network and Federal Reserve connections—essentially, everything that we needed and we knew like-minded ambitious financial companies require as well.

Our founding thesis remains unchanged: access to better financial products materially improves people's lives.

Today, Lithic powers card programs for 100+ innovative clients who are transforming the future of payments, from credit to disbursements to digital banking. And we’re just getting started.