Daragh Murphy

Co-Founder & CEO Imprint

Last Reviewed: September 25, 2026

Executive Summary

Daragh Murphy is co-founder and chief executive of Imprint, a New York fintech that designs, issues and services co-branded credit cards for consumer brands. It is an unusual business for a startup to take on: Imprint competes directly with the handful of large banks that have long controlled the co-brand market, holds the resulting credit card receivables and funds them through credit facilities and securitisation. Irish-born and trained as a lawyer, Murphy worked in corporate law and consulting and then held an operations and strategy role at WeWork before starting Imprint in 2020 with Thrive Capital’s Gaurav Ahuja. Brands including H-E-B, Rakuten, Booking.com and Shell now run card programmes on Imprint, and a $150 million Series D in December 2025 valued the company at $1.2 billion.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder and CEO of Imprint Payments, Inc., named as executive officer and director on its first SEC Form D in January 2021.
• Took Imprint to a $1.2B valuation with a $150M Series D led by Khosla Ventures (December 2025), after a $75M Series C in October 2024.
• Won co-brand programmes against incumbent banks, including Rakuten and Booking.com, and launched the Shell Performance Elite World Mastercard in May 2026.
• Built the funding structure a card issuer needs, including a $500M credit facility with Mizuho, Truist and HSBC and a securitisation programme reporting to the SEC.
• Previously Vice President of Operations and Strategy at WeWork; earlier worked at McKinsey & Company and as a corporate lawyer at WilmerHale.

Professional Journey

Murphy grew up in Ireland and studied law at University College Dublin. According to Contrary Research’s account of Imprint’s founding, he first came to the United States on a J-1 visa for what was meant to be a single summer in Chicago, and stayed. He went on to Duke University School of Law and practised corporate law at WilmerHale in New York, then joined McKinsey & Company in 2015. He later took an operating role at WeWork, where Silicon Republic gives his title as Vice President of Operations and Strategy; Contrary says his work there covered pricing and sales strategy, and that he left in 2019, shortly before WeWork’s failed IPO. He has since used WeWork as a cautionary example. In a December 2024 interview he rejected the “cult of personality” style of leadership and argued that a lender’s long-term test is return on equity.

His first idea as a founder was shared technology infrastructure for credit unions. Through that work he met Gaurav Ahuja, then a partner at Thrive Capital, who steered the conversation toward co-branded credit cards. In that market a few incumbent banks served the largest brands, while many large but not mega-cap brands had no modern option. Murphy committed to the idea full time in 2020, with Ahuja as chairman and Michael Pechman, another former Thrive colleague, as the third co-founder. Imprint Payments raised about $14 million in its first priced round, recorded in a Form D filed in January 2021.

Imprint’s model is vertically integrated: it designs the programme with the brand, runs the cardholder experience and underwriting, works with a partner bank to issue the card, and keeps the receivables. Murphy has said that this on-balance-sheet approach frightens some investors. His argument is that a prime-credit portfolio, with an average FICO score of about 705 in his December 2024 account, gradually cut Imprint’s funding costs from far above bank levels to about SOFR plus 250 basis points. Early programmes with the Texas grocer H-E-B, Brooks Brothers, Eddie Bauer and Westgate Resorts were followed by wins against incumbent banks for Rakuten and Booking.com. In May 2026 Shell launched a no-annual-fee Mastercard on Imprint’s platform.

Capital raising has kept pace with that growth. Imprint raised a $75 million Series C in October 2024 and secured a $500 million credit facility with Mizuho, Truist and HSBC in 2025. In December 2025 it closed a $150 million Series D led by Khosla Ventures, with Thrive Capital, Ribbit Capital, Kleiner Perkins and others participating, at a $1.2 billion valuation; Silicon Republic called it the latest Irish-founded unicorn. By then Imprint was reporting a 200% year-on-year rise in cardholders. It now has offices in New York, San Francisco and Bellevue, Washington, and a leadership team that includes former Carta and Calm CTO Will Larson.

Education

University College Dublin

Law

Duke University School of Law

Law (attended; degree not confirmed by a first-party source)