Privacy.com Powered Lithic's Product Iteration
Bo Jiang, co-founder and CEO of Lithic, on the key primitives in card issuing
Privacy.com gave Lithic something most infrastructure startups do not have, a live stress test running inside the company every day. Instead of waiting for enterprise customers to surface bugs or missing features, Lithic could watch real card traffic, failed transactions, support pain, and edge cases from its own consumer product, then turn those lessons into issuing APIs that were already battle tested before outside customers scaled on them.
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Lithic started as Privacy.com, a consumer app that lets people create virtual card numbers for online purchases. The B2B platform came from rebuilding that stack in house after running into legacy processor limits, then exposing the same infrastructure as APIs for other companies.
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That in house customer matters because issuer processing breaks on messy real world details. Lithic says Privacy helped it work through thousands of card issuing edge cases, and by 2021 the platform had already processed billions of dollars across millions of cards.
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This is also the core contrast with older processors and many all in one BaaS providers. Incumbents often prove scale by pointing to a few giant accounts, while Lithic built credibility by dogfooding the product continuously and then selling a modular card issuing layer to companies like Mercury and Novo.
Going forward, this internal feedback loop should keep mattering as card programs spread beyond neobanks into software driven payouts, procurement, and embedded finance. The companies that win card issuing will be the ones that turn transaction volume into faster product iteration, and Lithic entered that compounding loop earlier because its first large customer was already on its own platform.