Lithic, previously Privacy.com, which offers APIs to help businesses issue virtual credit cards, raises $60M, sources say at an $800M valuation
- Bessemer, Index Ventures, Exor also part of fundraising round — Firm's goal is to make issuing cards faster and easier
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months after Privacy.com's May rebrand as Lithic alongside its Bessemer-led $43M Series B, the card-issuing API startup is back with another $60M, reportedly at an $800M valuation. The new round brings in Index Ventures and Exor alongside returning backer Bessemer — a signal that investors see embedded card issuance as a category worth concentrating capital behind rather than a one-bet niche.
Lithic sits in a crowded but fast-funding lane: Plastiq has been pulling credit-card rails into SMB payments since its $75M Series D in 2020, Moss raised for virtual corporate cards in Europe, and account-to-account rival kevin. is attacking the same merchants without cards at all.
First-order effects
- Lithic gets roughly doubled capital within a quarter of its Series B, extending its runway to build out the issuing APIs whose stated goal is making card programs faster and easier for businesses to launch.
- Bessemer doubles down on a two-month-old bet while Index Ventures and Exor buy into the company at a reported $800M valuation, validating the rebrand-to-platform pivot.
Second-order effects
- Rival card-issuing API players face a funding arms race: Highnote's $90M Series B at a $750M+ valuation shows competitors matching Lithic round-for-round, pushing both toward price and integration-speed competition for developer customers.
- Co-branded-card platforms like Cardless, which raised its own $60M and projects steep revenue growth, become both potential customers of issuing infrastructure like Lithic's and competing full-stack alternatives — squeezing differentiation on either side.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, card issuance consolidates into an API layer where any software company can spin up a card program without a bank relationship of its own — shifting the economics of interchange and program management away from traditional issuers toward whoever owns the developer integration.
The trend: Card issuing is being unbundled into venture-funded API infrastructure, with Lithic, Highnote, and Cardless each racing to become the default rails for embedded credit products.