Lithic

Lithic primarily attracts fintechs, digital banks, and enterprises building card programs through its developer-friendly APIs and documented self-service infrastructure. The company highlights its fast speed-to-market — launching programs in weeks rather than the year-plus it experienced using legacy processors. Client testimonials on Lithic’s site emphasize implementation speed and the quality of its engineering and support teams.

Lithic collapses the processor layer by connecting directly to card networks and the Federal Reserve, cutting out the intermediary legacy processors that still run on mainframe-era infrastructure. The platform offers real-time ledgering, programmable risk controls, and end-to-end dispute management through a single API — a vertical integration that gives clients visibility and control over the full money-movement lifecycle.

Lithic is a technology infrastructure provider, not a bank. It offers two service models: a processing-only option where clients retain their own bank relationships, and a program-management service where Lithic offloads bank, network, and compliance operations for the client. In neither case does Lithic take deposits or lend from its own balance sheet.

Lithic is a private operating company that raised venture capital to fund its growth — investors on its cap table include institutional backers but are not publicly named. The firm does not operate a fund-of-funds program, nor does it allocate outside capital into third-party investments. Its capital structure is corporate, not a partnership or fund vehicle.

Lithic was incubated out of Privacy, the consumer virtual-card company that Bo Jiang co-founded in 2014 to provide single-use card numbers for online transactions. After spending over a year trying to launch Privacy on legacy issuer-processing infrastructure, the team decided to build their own modern processor — which later became Lithic’s standalone commercial product, serving external clients independently from the Privacy consumer app.