What is Lithic and what key problem does it solve in the market?

We started about eight years ago as a consumer virtual card business, privacy.com. It’s basically like a password manager, except for your card info. As a consumer, you can easily generate a brand new virtual card number for every purchase online. It’s really good for security, managing subscriptions, and making sure that your kids don’t rack up thousands in app purchases on games.

Business was great and continues to grow, but we built it on legacy card issuing infrastructure that’s over 20 years old. As we scaled, we found that we ultimately had to rebuild all of our own infrastructure in-house, piece by piece. And over the years, we talked to folks who were new to the card industry -- mostly neobanks, but also other companies who were generating cards or launching a card program as an essential part of their core business -- and they were all universally pretty frustrated with the existing solutions.

People would often ask, “Hey, could we use your APIs?” Fast forward to about two years ago -- so five years in -- we realized that the broader market really needed what we’d built for ourselves. And with a handful of early customers, we launched what became Lithic. Since then it’s been a pretty wild ride. We went from having raised less than $10 million in the life of the company over the first six years or so, to raising over $100 million, quadrupling the team, and being fortunate to have the trust of dozens and dozens of customers.