A trust problem, solved at 21
Payment is only half of a transaction. Conor Lyden built a company around the other half.
Conor Lyden grew up in Carrigaline, a town on the edge of Cork harbour, in a family of dentists. He did not follow them into the practice. He studied engineering at University College Cork, and somewhere between lectures and Liverpool football fixtures he noticed a problem that most people simply live with. He was buying and selling match tickets internationally, dealing with strangers online, and every exchange came down to the same nervous leap of faith.
"I was buying and selling tickets internationally," he has said. "They'd say 'just send money, I'll give you the ticket.' I wasn't comfortable with that." That discomfort is familiar to anyone who has ever paid a stranger online and then refreshed their inbox, waiting to find out whether they had just been robbed. Most people shrug and click send. Lyden, then 21, decided the moment itself was worth fixing.
The idea took shape inside Ignite, UCC's graduate business incubator, which he describes plainly as "an incubator for people with ideas." He incorporated the company around 2016 and formally founded Trustap in 2017. The first version was straightforward: an escrow app that held a buyer's money until the seller actually delivered the goods. If the item arrived as described, the money was released. If it did not, the funds were protected. It was a digital version of the neutral middleman that markets have relied on for centuries, rebuilt for people who would never meet in person.
I was buying and selling tickets internationally. They'd say 'just send money, I'll give you the ticket.' I wasn't comfortable with that.Conor Lyden, on the moment that started Trustap
The early lesson was one of scope. A standalone escrow app asks users to change their habits, to leave the marketplace they already trust and adopt something new. So Trustap evolved. Rather than competing with marketplaces for attention, the company began embedding its protection directly inside them, so buyers and sellers never leave the platform they are already on. The escrow logic runs quietly underneath the checkout. One of its most visible partnerships is with DoneDeal, Ireland's largest marketplace, and the model now spans classifieds, ticketing, luxury goods, electronics and vehicles.
How far the idea has travelled
The growth has been steep. Trustap reported a 370% year-over-year increase in transaction volume in the first half of 2025, and its footprint now reaches across more than 100 countries and currencies. The company operates six offices - Cork remains the headquarters, joined by Dublin, London, Barcelona, Zagreb and New York - with a team spread across Ireland, the UK, Spain, Croatia and the United States. In 2024 it closed a $5.5 million Series A led by TX Ventures, with SeedX, Aperture, MiddleGame Ventures, Act VC and Atlantic Bridge among the backers, and it added Ovidiu Solomonov, a former COO of European Markets at Adevinta, as board chair.
Pick your battles
Ask Lyden how a Cork startup ends up operating on three continents and the answer is less about ambition than discipline. "We must make sure that we're choosing the right things to work on and picking our battles," he says. The strategy has been deliberately patient: establish partners on the ground in each new country, one market at a time, rather than chasing every opportunity at once. He is candid that the hardest part of the early years was simply having to understand everything. "The biggest challenge for me as CEO of Trustap, especially in the very early stages, was to become an expert at every part."
His other recurring theme is people. "Business is all about people," he says, and he credits much of the company's sales success to personal relationships rather than clever funnels. The single piece of advice he returns to most is the one many founders hear and few act on: hire people better than you. "The best advice I ever got was to hire people better than you." He has kept close ties to where it started, mentoring UCC students and taking on interns from his alma mater.
"Payment is an important part of a transaction but it's only half of it."
"The best advice I ever got was to hire people better than you."
"We have ambitious plans to become the market leader in trusted transactions worldwide."
"Being on the western tip of Europe and an English-speaking country helps tremendously with accessibility to the US."
Global reach, local roots
Lyden now spends much of his time in New York, building out Trustap's US client base, but he has been firm that the company's headquarters stay in Cork. He talks about Ireland's position - on the western edge of Europe, English-speaking, a short hop from the American market - as a genuine strategic advantage rather than a sentimental one. The ambition he describes is unhedged: he wants Trustap to become the market leader in trusted transactions worldwide, with expansion plans that stretch toward emerging markets in Africa and South America over the coming decade.
It is a large goal for a category most people did not know had a name. But the pitch has stayed remarkably consistent since a 21-year-old engineering student first felt uneasy wiring money for a football ticket. Commerce between strangers has always depended on trust. Lyden's bet is that trust can be built into the payment itself - quietly, at scale, in more than a hundred currencies at once.