Alexander Leishman

Founder, CEO & CTO River

Last Reviewed: September 23, 2026

Executive Summary

Alexander Leishman is the founder, chief executive and chief technology officer of River, a bitcoin-only financial services company he started in 2019. River sells and custodies bitcoin on a full-reserve basis, pays interest on cash deposits in bitcoin, and runs Lightning Network payment infrastructure for other businesses. Holding both the CEO and CTO titles is unusual at a company River’s size, and it reflects his background. He is a security engineer by training, with a Stanford master’s in computer science. He helped teach Stanford’s first Bitcoin course and worked on security at Airbnb, the Taiwanese exchange MaiCoin and the crypto fund Polychain Capital before founding River. The company has raised a $12 million Series A and a $35 million Series B, the latter with Peter Thiel among the investors.

Career Highlights

• Founded River in February 2019. He is its CEO and CTO, overseeing investor relations, corporate strategy and engineering.
• Closed a $12 million Series A in March 2021, led by Goldcrest Capital with Polychain Capital, Craft Ventures, M13, Castle Island and The Kraft Group.
• Closed a $35 million Series B in May 2023, led by Kingsway Capital with Peter Thiel, Valor Equity Partners, M13, Goldcrest and others participating.
• Built River Lightning, an enterprise API for instant bitcoin payments that is integrated with El Salvador’s Chivo wallet.
• Joined MaiCoin, a Taiwanese bitcoin exchange, in March 2014, working on security fixes and merchant APIs.
• Served as a teaching assistant on the Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies course taught by Dan Boneh at Stanford.

Professional Journey

Leishman trained as an engineer. He completed an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering, then a master’s in computer science at Stanford. Along the way he worked as a robotics engineering intern, a cryptography researcher at Stanford and a software security engineer at Airbnb.

He moved into bitcoin in March 2014 with MaiCoin, a Taiwanese exchange focused on bitcoin trading and payments. There he found and fixed security vulnerabilities and built the APIs that merchants used. Back at Stanford for graduate study, he was a teaching assistant on the cryptocurrency course taught by Dan Boneh, co-founder of Stanford’s Computer Security Lab. He then built secure asset-management infrastructure for Polychain Capital, a crypto hedge fund.

In early 2019 he started River in a San Francisco apartment. The aim was to make bitcoin approachable for mainstream investors who found the industry intimidating. The product combined a multisignature custody model for client funds with support for spending bitcoin over the Lightning Network. By its March 2021 Series A the company had 25 staff and a native iOS app. It also said it was the first company to legally provide bitcoin services to residents of Hawaii. That $12 million round was led by Goldcrest Capital.

The $35 million Series B followed in May 2023, led by Kingsway Capital, with the company then describing itself from Columbus, Ohio. Leishman tied the raise to that spring’s bank failures, arguing that they showed why bitcoin mattered, and said part of the money would expand River Lightning, the enterprise payments API already used by El Salvador’s Chivo wallet. River has since added products including interest on cash deposits paid in bitcoin, a published proof of reserves and public financials, and ForceField, a scam and theft protection feature. Leishman writes many of the company’s product announcements himself.

Education

Stanford University

Master’s degree, Computer Science

He also holds an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering; the institution is not named in any source consulted.