Privy

Privy was co-founded in September 2021 by Henri Stern (ex-Protocol Labs researcher) and Asta Li (ex-Aurora engineer), initially focused on linking off-chain user data with on-chain addresses.

The company began as a "data tokenization" tool but later pivoted to embedded wallet infrastructure, concentrating on authentication, key management, and frictionless onboarding.

In April 2022, Privy closed an $8.3M seed round led by Sequoia Capital with BlueYard, setting the direction for its wallet SDK.

In November 2023, it raised an $18M Series A led by Paradigm, already serving many Web3 apps while emphasizing lower user onboarding friction.

In March 2025, Privy raised $15M led by Ribbit Capital, bringing total funding to about $40M and valuation to roughly $230M.

On June 11, 2025, Stripe announced the acquisition of Privy (after its $1.1B Bridge deal); Privy kept operating independently, powering 75M+ accounts across 1,000+ developer teams.

At Stripe Sessions 2026, Privy introduced digital asset accounts, a single interface for holding, moving and earning on stablecoins and tokenized assets, alongside wallet-by-wallet choice between custodial and self-custodial setups, yield via curated Morpho vaults and bank transfers through Bridge. It also launched agentic wallets and an Agent CLI that use a policy engine to constrain what AI agents can do with funds, and joined Stripe Projects so wallets and accounts can be provisioned from the command line.

The AWS partnership also shipped: Privy supplies the wallet infrastructure and payment rails for the first capabilities of Amazon Bedrock AgentCore payments, working alongside Coinbase. The product line further includes gas-sponsored transaction management, verifiable wallets and policy decisions, Coinbase and MoonPay fiat onramps, and packaged solutions for payment orchestration and smart contract management.

Future strategy and roadmap: More than a year inside Stripe, Privy's revenue is up about ninefold, wallet assets 25-fold and monthly transaction volume is near $25 billion, which is why its centre of gravity is becoming the default account layer for Stripe merchants rather than a standalone product. The same logic drives taking digital asset accounts to 150 countries: Stripe's merchant base dwarfs the 3,900 agent-payment merchants on Coinbase, so distribution, not key architecture, is the differentiator against Coinbase CDP. Ramp, Deel, Klarna and Hyperliquid layering banking features on one interface shows customers buy compliance and settlement bundled together. Wiring the ledger into Bridge remains substantial engineering, and it decides whether acquiring, balances and payouts collapse into a single flow.

Henri Stern, Co-founder and CEO: BA in Computer Science and Intellectual History from Columbia University and MS in Computer Science from Stanford; formerly a research scientist at Protocol Labs and a forward-deployed engineer at Palantir, he founded Privy with Asta Li in 2021 and stayed on after the company joined Stripe in July 2025, and from October 2026 also leads Stripe's crypto and stablecoin efforts. Asta Li, Co-founder and CTO: one of the first engineers at Aurora, focused on key management and authentication architecture; she co-founded Privy in 2021, drove the pivot from early data tokenisation to wallet infrastructure and now safeguards technical continuity after the Stripe integration. Andrew Hollenbach, Founding Engineer: formerly engineering lead at FORM Kitchens; he joined Privy in 2021 and builds its wallet APIs, developer tooling and self-custodial key sharding. The company is organised around two core lines, engineering and developer relations, each reporting to a co-founder.