Trustpilot Group plc

What does Trustpilot own?

It owns the Trustpilot platform, its review database of more than 361 million reviews, and the subscription products businesses buy. It is a single-brand company.

Is Trustpilot publicly traded?

Yes. Trustpilot Group plc trades on the London Stock Exchange under ticker TRST after its March 2021 IPO.

Who founded Trustpilot?

Peter Holten Muhlmann, who founded it in Copenhagen in 2007 and ran it until 2023, when Adrian Blair became CEO.

Where is Trustpilot headquartered?

Copenhagen, Denmark, with offices in London, New York, Denver, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Milan, and Melbourne.

How many brands does Trustpilot own?

One. The entire company operates under the single Trustpilot brand.

Who owns Trustpilot?

Public shareholders on the London Stock Exchange. Institutional investors hold most equity, with the founder retaining a personal stake but no control.

How does Trustpilot make money?

Business subscriptions for review tools, analytics, and marketing licenses. Consumers post reviews free, and businesses cannot pay for reviews themselves.

Peter Holten Muhlmann founded Trustpilot in Copenhagen in 2007. The concept came from watching his father try to judge whether online shops were trustworthy: a platform where real customers could post reviews openly seemed the obvious answer and did not yet exist at scale.

Early growth came organically as e-commerce expanded. The open model, where businesses could not prevent reviews, drove both rapid content accumulation and constant friction with reviewed companies, a tension that has defined the platform ever since.

Venture rounds through the 2010s funded international expansion into the UK, US, and European markets. The company added the paid business tools that turned the review corpus into revenue: profile claiming, review invitations, analytics, and marketing licenses.

The March 2021 London IPO valued Trustpilot at about 1.1 billion pounds and made it one of Denmark's highest-profile tech listings abroad. Public-market life was initially rocky as growth-stock sentiment turned.

Muhlmann stepped down in 2023 after 16 years, handing the CEO role to former Just Eat executive Adrian Blair. Blair narrowed the focus to enterprise customers, pricing discipline, and profitability, and the results followed: EBITDA margin expanded from 11.4 percent to 15.6 percent in fiscal 2025 alone.

Fiscal 2025 was the company's best year: revenue of $261.1 million up 24 percent, bookings of $291.4 million up 22 percent, 27,362 paying customers, and its first meaningful operating profit. The company now positions itself as the trust platform for an AI-driven internet.

The company's product is its ethics: an open, independent review ecosystem where authenticity is the core value. Its content integrity organization uses AI and investigators to detect fake, incentivized, and manipulated reviews, removing millions annually and publishing transparency reports.

It takes legal action against fake-review networks and supports regulatory efforts including EU DSA compliance and FTC fake-review rules, positioning itself as part of the solution rather than the problem.

The persistent controversy is the platform model itself: recurring claims that fake or manipulated reviews slip through, and allegations, which the company denies, that paying businesses receive favorable treatment. Its integrity systems and transparency reporting are the standing answer.

Trustpilot has been both plaintiff and defendant in review-related litigation, suing fake-review sellers and facing suits from businesses over negative content. Courts have generally upheld its right to host and moderate consumer opinion.

Danish and EU regulators have examined review platform practices periodically, and the company adapted its invitation rules in earlier years under regulator pressure, tightening what counts as a verified review.