We can summon a car with a tap or stream any movie ever made in seconds, but the underlying technology of our financial system often feels like a relic from a different century. While the user interfaces of our banking apps are sleek and modern, the plumbing beneath them, the “issuer processing” that actually moves money, has remained largely unchanged for decades. This invisible infrastructure is the bottleneck of financial innovation. It is slow, rigid, and dominated by legacy giants running on mainframes from the 1970s. For years, any company wanting to launch a new card program faced a mountain of bureaucracy and technical debt. Breaking this bottleneck required more than just a better app; it required a fundamental rebuild of the financial stack from the ground up.
The High Cost of Stagnant Systems
The problem facing the fintech industry was not a lack of ideas, but a lack of access. Traditional issuer processors were built for a world of physical plastic cards and monthly statements, not for the high-velocity, programmatic world of digital commerce. For developers or startups trying to integrate with these legacy systems, it was a nightmare. Onboarding could take over a year, costs were opaque, and the technical documentation was often non-existent or outdated. This “financial gatekeeping” meant that only the largest institutions could afford to innovate. Small businesses and niche startups were left out in the cold, unable to create the bespoke financial tools their customers actually needed. The industry was ripe for a “lithic” shift, a return to a foundational, solid, and reliable base that could support modern growth.
The Architect of Modern Payments
Bo Jiang (officially Boling Jiang) is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lithic. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a B.S. in Applied Mathematics, Jiang possesses the rare blend of technical depth and strategic foresight necessary to tackle systemic problems. Before entering the world of fintech, he worked as a research assistant at the MIT Media Lab and as a software engineer at Hatch Labs. These roles fostered an obsession with how data moves and how systems can be optimized for performance. Jiang is not your typical “move fast and break things” founder; he is an engineer by trade who approaches company building as an exercise in solving complex mathematical and structural puzzles.
A Quest for Digital Privacy
Lithic did not start as a B2B infrastructure giant. It began with a much more personal mission. In 2014, in the wake of massive retail data breaches and growing concerns over online tracking, Jiang and his co-founders, Jason Kruse and David Nichols, launched Privacy.com. The motivation was simple: give consumers a way to protect their financial identities online. Privacy.com allowed users to generate virtual cards for every merchant, ensuring that if one site was hacked, the user’s primary bank account remained safe. This product was an instant hit with security-conscious users, but as the team tried to scale, they hit a wall. They realized that the legacy processors they were using to run Privacy.com were the very thing holding them back. They were paying high fees for a service that was slow and inflexible.
Building the Bedrock of Fintech
Realizing that the “broken financial supply chain” was a bigger problem than just their own scaling issues, Jiang and his team made a pivotal decision. They decided to build the infrastructure they wished they had. They spent years developing a modern, developer-friendly card issuing and processing stack. In 2020, they released the “Lithic” platform to the public, and by May 2021, the company officially rebranded from Privacy.com to Lithic. The name was chosen to reflect the foundational nature of their work, “lithic” referring to stone, the ultimate bedrock. By providing well-documented APIs, direct connections to networks, and real-time reconciliation, Lithic allowed other companies to launch card programs in weeks rather than years.
Navigating Growth and Challenges
The transition from a consumer-facing app to a core infrastructure provider was not without its hurdles. Lithic entered a highly competitive market, facing off against established players like Marqeta and the issuing arms of giants like Stripe. However, under Jiang’s leadership, Lithic carved out a niche by focusing on “performance-engineered” tools for developers. The company successfully raised approximately $115.4 million in funding, with a notable $60 million Series C round in July 2021, led by Stripes, which valued the company at $800 million. As of 2026, Lithic has scaled to process billions of dollars in transactions annually, powering over 100 innovative clients ranging from digital banks to B2B platforms. The challenge moved from “will it work?” to “how fast can we scale to meet global demand?”
A Vision of Programmable Money
Jiang’s expertise lies in his understanding that money is increasingly becoming “software.” In his view, the future of finance is not just about moving digits from one account to another, but about the logic attached to those digits. Under his guidance, Lithic has expanded its capabilities into advanced areas like the Commercial Revolving Credit API, launched in late 2024, which allows companies to build sophisticated credit products without needing to be a bank themselves. He envisions a world where every software company is, in some way, a fintech company. By abstracting away the complexity of compliance, banking relationships, and ledgering, Jiang is enabling a new generation of “agentic” commerce where AI agents and automated systems can handle payments securely and autonomously.
Leading with Clarity and Resilience
In an industry often characterized by hype, Jiang’s leadership style is refreshingly grounded. He is known for maintaining a culture of engineering excellence and transparency. Within Lithic, there is a strong emphasis on long-term thinking; Jiang often highlights that building financial infrastructure is a “marathon, not a sprint.” His approach to leadership involves hiring deeply technical experts, such as Chief Product Officer Robin Gandhi, and giving them the autonomy to solve hard problems. He avoids the spotlight, preferring to let the reliability and uptime of the Lithic platform speak for itself. This “product-first” mentality has earned him the respect of both his peers in the Silicon Valley ecosystem and the traditional banking partners Lithic works with.
The Horizon of Global Financial Choice
As we look toward the second half of the decade, Lithic’s trajectory is focused on global expansion and deeper integration of emerging technologies. The company officially moved beyond U.S. borders in September 2024, launching multicurrency processing in Canada. Furthermore, Lithic is at the forefront of the evolution where AI and stablecoins converge. In September 2025, the company forged a strategic partnership with Rain to accelerate the adoption of stablecoin-powered payments. In early 2026, it announced a major partnership with Stearns Bank to further solidify its enterprise-grade card capabilities. The ultimate goal is a world where financial products are as easy to build as a website, democratizing access to capital and commerce for everyone, everywhere.
