Daragh Murphy came to the United States on a J-1 visa for what was meant to be a short summer in Chicago. He stayed, and years later he runs one of the few Irish-founded companies to cross a billion-dollar valuation.
The path was not the usual founder story. Before Imprint there was no engineering degree and no banking career. Murphy trained as a lawyer. He earned a Bachelor of Laws at University College Dublin, then a Master of Laws at Duke University, and practiced corporate law at WilmerHale in New York. He is admitted to the bar in New York, California and Massachusetts.
In 2015 he left law for McKinsey & Company, where he worked as a management consultant. From there he moved into an operating role at WeWork, focused on pricing, sales and strategy. He left in 2019, a few months before the company's IPO collapsed in public view. That timing turned out to matter. Murphy now talks about WeWork less as a resume line and more as a case study in what not to do - a lesson in the danger of building a company around a single personality instead of a shared mission.
The gap nobody was serving
Imprint started in 2020, co-founded with Gaurav Ahuja, a partner at Thrive Capital who now serves as chairman, and Michael Pechman. The first idea was infrastructure for credit unions. It was Ahuja who pushed the pivot toward co-branded credit cards after spotting a gap in the market: the biggest banks, Chase and Amex, dominated the top of the market, while mid-sized consumer brands were left with aging technology that was too slow and too limited for their customers.
Murphy and his co-founders tested the idea the direct way - by talking to the brands. What they heard was that executives had already considered launching a card and had walked away, because the existing options simply were not built for them. So Imprint set out to build a new tech stack from scratch: one that let a brand design, launch and run a card program that actually felt like the brand, rather than a generic card with a logo printed on it.
The customer profile surprised early assumptions. Murphy's team initially guessed direct-to-consumer e-commerce brands would be the natural fit. Instead it was large enterprises - grocery chains, airlines, hospitality names - that leaned in. When the Texas grocery chain H-E-B showed real interest, Imprint followed the signal rather than the plan.