Meet the companies attending this year's Dublin Tech Summit...
Name of company: Lydia
Names of founders: Cyril Chiche, Antoine Porte
Tell us about your company…
Lydia’s mobile app makes it easy to send money. Whether you need to pay back a friend for rent, make a purchase in your local coffee shop, or buy a concert ticket online, Lydia offers a simple interface so you can link your phone with your card and pay anyone with one app.
Pitch us what you do in one line...
Send money to anyone instantly and for free.
What makes your service unique?
Fintech has become a veritable buzzword, and new payments startups are launching at an impressive rate. What distinguishes Lydia is the breadth of our services. We don’t just do consumer or professional payments, we don’t provide just a ticketing service or a smart payments card - we’re all of these things. Most platforms and apps are geared towards one specific element of payments, whereas we are a universal payments platform. Ultimately, we believe that this is much easier for consumers. Money is money, so it doesn’t make sense to have to use multiple services to spend and manage it.
Why are you coming to the Dublin Tech Summit?
Dublin Tech Summit is perfectly timed with our launch of our Android app in Ireland, so it's an excellent opportunity for us to come and meet key partners, speak to as many users as possible, and generally say a big bonjour to the emerald isle. Oh, and it would be wrong to leave without having at least one pint of Guinness.
What advice would you give to an early-stage startup?
Never stop trying, and be very, very careful with your cash.
Looking back, what advice would you give to yourselves starting out?
Start international operations from day one!
What are your plans for the next 12 months?
Conquering Ireland! As well as spreading the Lydia love in Ireland, we will be focusing on increasing our footprint across Europe including the UK, Spain, and Germany. Besides this, we’re also working on some pretty exciting product developments, including new features for our recently launched Lydia card, which we are looking forward to rolling out beyond France soon.
Mise à jour iOS. La v6.5 est disponible dans l’App Store. Elle est belle, elle est bleue, et elle sauve la vie des petits pouces. #changelog pic.twitter.com/BxUdxwUsTr
— Lydia (@applydia) January 20, 2017
What is the most exciting thing in tech right now?
There is a whole host of new and exciting technologies being developed right now from VR to IoT, autonomous vehicles to chatbots - such as our Lydia Bot for Slack - and AI more generally. However, what’s really exciting isn’t the tech itself, but the fact that these technological developments are increasingly being used, on a global scale, to democratise and demystify systems and institutions that previously were only available to the lucky few. The pace and breadth of this change is exhilarating.
Why does the Dublin Tech Summit matter?
Ireland is an increasingly hot market in terms of technology - being home to tech companies from GAFA to rapidly growing start-ups. The inaugural Dublin Tech Summit is like a peacock dance for both Irish tech companies and for start-ups like us that are launching in Ireland to show we're ready to play.
Tell us something that we need to know...
Contrary to what you might think, Lydia wasn't named after one of our mums or first girlfriends. It actually refers to the ancient kingdom of Lydia, where the first coins were minted around the seventh century B.C. We chose the name as a playful nod to the entire history of money - at the very moment that modern technology is enabling us to write the next chapter of this story.
