Lithic vs IBM

Side-by-side comparison of AI visibility scores, market position, and capabilities

IBM leads in AI visibility (80 vs 66)

Lithic

ChallengerEmbedded Finance

Card Issuing Infrastructure

Card issuing and payment infrastructure platform for developers. NYC, raised $60M+, provides card APIs for fintech companies and platforms building embedded payment products.

AI VisibilityBeta
Overall Score
B66
Category Rank
#1 of 1
AI Consensus
66%
Trend
up
Per Platform
ChatGPT
70
Perplexity
74
Gemini
72

About

Lithic is a card issuing and payment infrastructure platform built for developers and product teams building embedded payment experiences. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in New York City, the company has raised over $60 million in funding. Lithic provides APIs for virtual and physical card issuance, transaction authorization, spend controls, and payment data that companies integrate into their software products to add card-based financial capabilities.\n\nLithic's developer-first approach distinguishes it in the card issuing space — the platform is designed for technical teams who want to integrate card functionality directly into their product without the overhead of working through traditional banking infrastructure. Its sandbox environment allows developers to test card programs end-to-end before going live, and its documentation and SDK support accelerate time to production. Lithic handles the regulatory infrastructure including BIN sponsorship, network membership, and issuer licensing on behalf of its customers.\n\nLithic's card programs support a range of use cases including corporate expense cards, marketplace disbursement cards, gaming and rewards cards, and B2B payment cards. The platform's programmable spend controls allow issuers to set merchant category restrictions, transaction limits, and velocity controls that enforce specific spending policies for each card type. Lithic has focused on transparency and pricing clarity as differentiators in a market where interchange economics and interchange sharing structures are often opaque.

Full profile

IBM

LeaderEnterprise Software

General

Armonk NY hybrid cloud and enterprise AI (NYSE: IBM) at $62.8B revenue; $6B+ generative AI bookings, record $12.7B free cash flow 2024, DataStax acquisition for watsonx vector database competing with Microsoft Azure for enterprise AI.

AI VisibilityBeta
Overall Score
A80
Category Rank
#56 of 1158
AI Consensus
67%
Trend
up
Per Platform
ChatGPT
74
Perplexity
71
Gemini
84

About

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an Armonk, New York-based global technology and consulting company — publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: IBM) as an S&P 500 component — providing hybrid cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence software, and enterprise IT consulting through approximately 270,300 employees in 170 countries with $62.8 billion in annual revenue. Founded on June 16, 1911, as Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company through a merger orchestrated by financier Charles Ranlett Flint, renamed IBM in 1924 under Thomas Watson Sr., IBM has undergone multiple strategic transformations over its 110+ year history: building the System/360 mainframe platform (1964), launching the IBM PC (1981), selling the PC division to Lenovo (2005, $1.75B), and completing the $34 billion Red Hat acquisition (2019) that repositioned IBM as a hybrid cloud platform company. CEO Arvind Krishna (appointed April 2020) has focused IBM's strategy on three areas: hybrid cloud (powered by Red Hat OpenShift, the enterprise Kubernetes platform), AI (the watsonx platform for enterprise AI model development and deployment), and enterprise consulting. Under Krishna, IBM recorded $12.7 billion in free cash flow in 2024 (a company record), surpassed $6 billion in generative AI bookings since June 2023, and saw the stock price double — trading at all-time highs through 2024-2025. IBM announced the DataStax acquisition in 2025 to deepen watsonx's data layer with AstraDB (vector database for AI applications), DataStax Enterprise (Apache Cassandra), and Langflow (low-code AI agent development).

Full profile

AI Visibility Head-to-Head

66
Overall Score
80
#1
Category Rank
#56
66
AI Consensus
67
up
Trend
up
70
ChatGPT
74
74
Perplexity
71
72
Gemini
84
72
Claude
74
60
Grok
81

Capabilities & Ecosystem

Capabilities

Only Lithic
Card Issuing Infrastructure
IBM is classified as company.

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