The File
Person / Founder
Dublin -> New York - Filed July 2026
Shane Curran
Won a national science prize at 16. Lasted three days at university. Now runs a $46M encryption company from Broadway.
Won a national science prize at 16. Lasted three days at university. Now runs a $46M encryption company from Broadway.
The interesting thing about Shane Curran is not that he was sixteen when he built qCrypt. It is that qCrypt is still, in a sense, what he sells - encryption that keeps working while the data is being used.
Curran runs Evervault, a Dublin-founded, New York-headquartered infrastructure company that keeps sensitive data - card numbers, health records, secret keys - encrypted while it is being processed. The company runs those workloads inside AWS Nitro Enclaves, which is a specific hardware boundary that promises nobody outside the enclave, including Evervault, sees the plaintext. That is the pitch. It is a boring pitch, and Evervault has raised roughly $46 million to keep repeating it, most recently a $25 million Series B in March 2026 led by Ribbit Capital, with Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and Operator Partners all showing up again.
The reason he is any good at this is a fairly specific accident of the Irish education system. In 2017, at sixteen, Curran won the 53rd BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, Ireland's marquee school science contest, for a project he called qCrypt - a post-quantum encrypted storage platform with what he described as "multi-jurisdictional quorum sharing." The words matter mostly because they are the kind of words a sixteen year old writes on a poster board and then later has to defend to Sequoia partners, which he did. He represented Ireland at the European Union Contest for Young Scientists in Tallinn that autumn. In January 2018, Forbes put him on 30 Under 30.
Then the funny bit. He enrolled at University College Dublin to read business and law. He was there for three days. He left to work on Evervault full time. There is a version of this sentence you have read before, about other founders, and the polite thing to note is that it usually does not work. Here it did.
In October 2019 Evervault announced a $3.2 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital, with Kleiner Perkins, Frontline Ventures and SV Angel. Curran has told the story of how that round started: he sent a cold email, and a Sequoia partner sent back, in effect, "Coffee?" This is the kind of story that is only useful in retrospect, because for every founder who takes the coffee and closes the round there are a thousand who take the coffee and do not. Still, coffee.
The Series A came in May 2020, a $16 million round led by Index Ventures. Curran was twenty. The Irish Times ran the news the way it usually runs it, with the age of the founder in the first paragraph. By 2024 Evervault had done the thing many privacy-tools companies eventually do: it went into payments. The company launched what it calls an independent payments security platform, aimed at fintechs, banks and merchants who want more control over their payment stack without inheriting a PCI DSS project. Card issuer integration, network tokens, 3D Secure, tokenization, key management. The compliance-tax parts of fintech, sold as a product.
The Series B in March 2026 is a graduation of sorts. Ribbit Capital, which is the specialist fintech investor, leading the round is a signal about who Evervault thinks its customers are now. It is not really a privacy toolkit for indie developers anymore; it is a payments security company that happens to be built on cryptographic infrastructure. Curran is twenty-five. The total raised is roughly $46 million.
My worst nightmare is to sell the company for 50 or 100 million dollars.- Shane Curran, to The Currency
Most founders keep this thought to themselves. Curran said it out loud, in an interview, on the record. It is a useful piece of self-branding and, if you take him at his word, a fairly aggressive statement about time horizons. A hundred million dollars is a career for most people. He is treating it as a failure mode.
"Privacy is a basic expectation and human right, but it's something that should never create any friction or slow down the speed of technological advancement."
"My belief is that privacy is shifting away from compliance to products that people are building, and I want to develop a toolkit so developers can build privacy into new products like apps and services."
"The real answer is just frustration. My background is software engineering. I was building a bunch of tools and products that were handling all sorts of sensitive data."
Sensitive workloads run inside AWS Nitro Enclaves. The enclave is a hardware boundary; neither AWS, nor Evervault, nor the customer's own engineers can peek at what is being processed inside.
Developer SDKs handle encryption at capture and decryption only at the last mile. Card numbers, personal data and keys move through customer systems as ciphertext.
Since 2024, the platform speaks card issuer integration, network tokens, 3D Secure and tokenization, addressed to fintechs, banks and merchants tired of running their own PCI DSS project.
Curran wrote something he calls the Pragmatic Privacy Manifesto, a document meant to describe how Evervault ships. He would like other companies to adopt it. Some may.
Attended the south Dublin secondary school before UCD. That was where qCrypt started as a science project, not a company.
Beyond running Evervault, Curran has done work as a Sequoia Scout, writing small checks into other founders on the firm's behalf.
Evervault's US address is a cast-iron building on the edge of TriBeCa. It is not a coincidence that a company selling infrastructure took a fifteenth of a block of it.
The interesting thing about Curran's stated fear of a $50-100 million exit is that it is not a strategy statement; it is a filter. It tells you which acquirers he will not talk to, which board members he will not appoint and which product bets he will not take.
His stated aim is to build Evervault into a durable, independent encryption infrastructure business that reframes privacy as a product surface, not a compliance checkbox. The 2024 pivot into payments, and the 2026 Ribbit-led round, are steps in that direction. Whether the market rewards patience is a separate question. The founder, in the meantime, is twenty-five.