Henri Stern

"Stablecoins are like Starlink for money," Stern has said. "Once it's in zero gravity, it's super efficient to move. But the ground stations have to be built." Privy builds ground stations.¹

Henri Stern is the co-founder and chief executive of Privy, a company that built embedded wallet infrastructure: software letting an ordinary app give its users a self-custodial digital-asset account without requiring a separate crypto wallet. Privy's technology sits underneath consumer apps, neobanks, and payroll platforms rather than being visible to end users. Stripe acquired the company in 2025, folding it into its broader push into stablecoins and digital-asset infrastructure.

Background

Stern is French-born and moved to the United States for his education. He studied computer and information sciences alongside intellectual history at Columbia University, then completed a master's in computer science at Stanford, where he did academic work in cryptography. That combination, a humanities-adjacent undergraduate track paired with formal training in cryptographic systems, shaped how he later talked about crypto products: as much a question of trust and usability as of protocol design.

Getting started

Before Privy, Stern's career moved between finance, enterprise software, and research: a stint as a summer analyst in investment banking at Lazard, an earlier and smaller consumer venture, work as a forward-deployed engineer at Palantir, and time as a research scientist at Protocol Labs on decentralized-systems research connected to the Filecoin network, which put him inside the crypto-infrastructure world heading into the 2021 bull market.

That period left him frustrated with the industry's habit of shipping protocols without carrying them through to products ordinary people could use; he has said the space builds infrastructure that is technically impressive but rarely reaches an end customer in usable form.¹ Returning to crypto at the height of 2021 enthusiasm, he began working on a narrower problem: linking off-chain identity data, such as emails and names, to on-chain addresses for KYC purposes. That work surfaced a more basic obstacle underneath it: most users could not sign a transaction or hold an asset at all, since doing so required an external wallet like MetaMask, which most people would never install. Stern and co-founder Asta Li, whom he partnered with shortly before starting the company, decided to solve that problem first. Privy was founded in September 2021 with Stern as chief executive.

What he built

Privy provides application programming interfaces that let developers issue self-custodial wallets as a native part of their own product, rather than sending users to a third-party wallet application. A developer building a neobank, trading app, or payments product can use Privy to spin up a wallet for each user automatically, handle private-key management and recovery, and let that user hold and transact in stablecoins or other digital assets inside the host app. Cryptographic control stays with the end user, but the experience looks like ordinary app functionality rather than crypto software.

The company raised a seed round in 2022 co-led by Sequoia Capital and BlueYard Capital, an 18 million dollar Series A in 2023 led by Paradigm, whose Matt Huang joined the board, and a further round led by Ribbit Capital in 2025, totaling roughly 40 million dollars before acquisition.

In June 2025, Stripe announced it was acquiring Privy, following closely on Stripe's much larger acquisition of stablecoin orchestration company Bridge earlier that year. Terms were not officially disclosed, though reporting placed the deal's value in the low hundreds of millions of dollars. Inside Stripe, Privy became the account layer of the company's stablecoin stack, alongside Bridge's orchestration layer. One clear example of Privy's infrastructure in production is its role behind Deel's dollar-denominated contractor balances, announced in mid-2026: Privy provisions the wallet accounts letting Deel's contractors hold and earn on stablecoin balances without managing keys, with yield on idle funds running through the lending protocol Morpho.²

How he operates

Stern has said he modeled Privy's own product philosophy on Stripe's, aiming for simple, elegant application programming interfaces that make previously difficult things possible, well before Stripe became Privy's acquirer. He frames the wallet-fragmentation this creates, a user's assets spread across many apps, as tolerable so long as the underlying accounts stay programmable enough to be consolidated later.

As a condition of joining Stripe, Stern insisted that Privy continue serving Bridge's competitors rather than being folded into an exclusive, vertically integrated stack. He has compared the logic to Microsoft Office running on both Mac and Windows: a company serious about being infrastructure cannot restrict itself to one platform.¹ This is the clearest expression of his broader belief that stablecoin infrastructure should stay modular, with account layers like Privy's remaining interoperable rather than consolidating into closed stacks. The preference for staying open across competing platforms, even after being acquired by one of the largest players in the space, is the through-line: Privy is infrastructure other financial products plug into rather than an end-user product of its own.

Stern also believes stablecoin infrastructure will eventually recede into invisibility, comparing it to cloud computing or solid-state drives, technology reliable enough to disappear from view. He has framed the shift underway across payroll and payments as one in which companies move from merely transmitting money to helping customers hold, grow, and spend it, an argument he has summarized by saying the future of financial products is not just about moving money but about helping people do more with it once it arrives.²

Where things stand

As of 2026, Stern remains chief executive of Privy, now operating as a unit inside Stripe. Privy's infrastructure continues to expand beyond its original crypto-native client base, including work with Amazon Web Services on stablecoin wallets for autonomous AI agents and an exploratory partnership with Klarna on a consumer crypto wallet. Stern continues to speak publicly, alongside Bridge co-founder Zach Abrams and Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, about how the stablecoin stack should evolve while staying modular.

Key facts

• Born in France; holds a bachelor's degree from Columbia in computer and information sciences and intellectual history, and a master's in computer science from Stanford.
• Earlier career included stints at Palantir as a forward-deployed engineer and at Protocol Labs as a research scientist on Filecoin-related research.
• Co-founded Privy with Asta Li in September 2021, after work on crypto identity tokenization revealed most users could not sign on-chain transactions without an external wallet.
• Privy raised a 2022 seed co-led by Sequoia and BlueYard, an 18 million dollar 2023 Series A led by Paradigm, and a further 2025 round led by Ribbit Capital, totaling roughly 40 million dollars before acquisition.
• Stripe acquired Privy in June 2025, shortly after its larger acquisition of stablecoin company Bridge, making Privy the account layer of Stripe's stablecoin infrastructure.
• Privy's wallet infrastructure powers Deel's dollar-denominated contractor balances, with yield on idle funds delivered through the lending protocol Morpho.