Colin Luce is co-founder and chief executive of Basis Theory, the San Francisco company that sells a payment vault to merchants and software platforms. "We're giving control back by making payments data as accessible and programmable as any other data type," he said in 2025. Read our review of Basis Theory.
Starting Basis Theory in 2020
He founded the company in 2020 with Brian Billingsley and Ben Milne, a group that Basis Theory describes as fintech veterans whose experience spans Yodlee, Dwolla, and Klarna. The company sells a cloud-native, PCI-compliant vault that works independently of any payment processor.
Keeping Merchants in Control of Their Data
Luce argues that merchants no longer want to be locked into rigid platforms. A merchant that stores card data in its own vault can send it to several payment service providers.
Basis Theory holds PCI Level 1, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and HIPAA credentials, and its customers include Pinterest, Melio, and MoneyGram.
Tokenization and Agentic Commerce
In a Lithic podcast with his chief technology officer, James Armstead, Luce discussed how tokenization became a competitive moat for the payments industry and why he believes it is the foundation agentic commerce needs. Basis Theory leads the Agentic Commerce Consortium, a network of more than 20 companies defining standards that let AI agents act as trusted buyers.
In October 2025 it raised a $33M Series B led by Costanoa to expand engineering, product, and go-to-market teams.
