Trust in every transaction. The escrow layer that holds the money until the deal is actually done.
Every online transaction between strangers contains one uncomfortable moment: someone has to go first. The buyer sends money and hopes the item arrives, or the seller ships the goods and hopes the payment clears. Trustap, an Irish fintech founded in Cork in 2017, built its entire business on removing that moment.
The mechanism is deliberately simple. When a deal is struck, the buyer's money goes into a Trustap-held account rather than the seller's. The funds sit there - in escrow - through the delivery process. Only once the buyer confirms the item arrived as described, or a complaints window elapses, does Trustap release the money to the seller. No confirmation, no payout.
It is escrow, a centuries-old idea, rebuilt for the speed and anonymity of online marketplaces. What makes Trustap more than a digital lockbox is that it takes on the whole awkward middle of a transaction: it becomes the merchant of record, handles the payment rails, layers in identity checks and KYC/AML compliance, coordinates delivery, and steps in to mediate when a dispute breaks out.
The founder, Conor Lyden, did not arrive at the problem through market research. As an engineering student at University College Cork, he travelled regularly to England for football matches and kept buying tickets from strangers online - people on classifieds sites and Facebook who insisted he pay up front. He was uneasy every time, and eventually he was scammed. "I was scammed one time too many," he later said. The concept for Trustap grew out of that frustration, incubated through UCC's IGNITE programme.
Nearly a decade on, Trustap works with more than 250 marketplace and platform partners across roughly 27 countries in Europe, Asia and the US, has raised over $20 million, and is now betting that the next set of buyers won't be human at all.
Buyer and seller agree terms on a marketplace or directly. Trustap creates the transaction and verifies identities.
The buyer's payment goes into a Trustap-held account - not the seller's - so the money is secured but not yet released.
The seller ships or hands over the item, confident that the money is already there and guaranteed once delivery is confirmed.
Once the buyer confirms - or the complaints window passes - Trustap pays the seller. Disputes are mediated in between.
Peer-to-peer buyers no longer have to send money to strangers on trust. Funds are held, not handed over.
Because money is only released after delivery is confirmed, there is far less to dispute or claw back later.
Platforms offload payments, compliance and customer support to Trustap as merchant of record and focus on growth.
Cars, luxury goods, tickets and second-hand items - the riskiest categories - get protection on both sides.
Multi-currency support and built-in KYC/AML let deals happen across ~27 countries with less compliance headache.
When something goes wrong, Trustap mediates rather than leaving buyer and seller to fight it out alone.
Trustap serves three broad audiences: marketplaces and ecommerce operators that embed it via API to run transactions end-to-end; individual consumers who open a personal escrow account for a single risky purchase; and, increasingly, AI shopping agents acting on a person's behalf.
The goods flowing through range from smaller-value electronics and event tickets to vehicles and luxury items - exactly the transactions where a stranger's promise isn't enough.
The core escrow-style, milestone-based service. Trustap acts as merchant of record - holding funds, verifying sellers, running compliance and mediating disputes.
Embeddable infrastructure that lets platforms run payments end-to-end and offload logistics, compliance and support.
A personal escrow account for one-off peer-to-peer deals - protecting both sides in transactions with strangers, online or in person.
Turns fragmented marketplace inventory into machine-readable listings so AI shopping agents can discover, compare and transact - with a human confirmation still required before any funds release.
As shoppers start delegating purchases to conversational AI models that search, compare and check out on their behalf, Trustap spotted a structural gap: most marketplace listings aren't machine-readable, and no one should let an AI move money without a human's sign-off.
Trustap Index, funded by the 2026 raise and scheduled to launch later that year, consolidates messy inventory data into structured information agents can act on - from mainstream retail searches to rare, second-hand items listed by individuals. Every agent-initiated purchase still routes through Trustap's secure infrastructure and waits for human confirmation before release.
Trustap wants to be the trusted payment layer for all online commerce - agentic and human alike.
Where it sits vs. the alternatives
Payment processors move money; escrow services hold it. Trustap's distinction is bundling both with identity, protection and dispute resolution as a single merchant-of-record transaction - and extending that trust layer to AI agents rather than just human checkouts.
Total funding to date: over $20M. Bar lengths are proportional to round size, not cumulative.
Engineering student Conor Lyden, scammed buying football tickets, conceives Trustap through University College Cork's IGNITE incubator.
The company is incorporated in Cork to bring escrow-style protection to transactions between strangers.
API integrations let marketplaces run end-to-end transactions with Trustap as merchant of record.
Raises around $3.4M to grow its payments and protection platform internationally.
TX Ventures leads a Series A, taking total funding past $9M and partners past 250 across ~27 countries.
Aperture Capital leads a $10M round to fund headcount and launch Trustap Index for the age of AI shopping.
Fun facts
The company exists because Conor Lyden kept getting burned buying Liverpool football tickets from strangers online.
Trustap began as a project in UCC's IGNITE graduate incubator - Lyden's degree was in engineering, not finance.
As "merchant of record," Trustap legally sits inside the transaction rather than just passing money through.
Even in the AI-agent era, a human must approve before any money actually moves.
Official links
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