Dmitry Tokarev was a quant before he was a crypto founder, and that explains almost everything about Copper.
He came to London to study risk management and financial engineering at Imperial College, graduating with distinction, and started as a quantitative analyst. Later he moved to Dolfin Asset Management in Mayfair, where he became chief technology officer and a partner. His job was to think about what could go wrong with money.
The company offered custody, prime broking and settlement for institutions in one place.
Then crypto arrived. Institutions wanted exposure, yet the tools for holding digital assets were crude. He saw that investors had no workable way to store them with the control and speed they needed. He founded Copper in London in 2018 to close that gap.
The company offered custody, prime broking and settlement for institutions in one place. For a risk person it was the obvious design. For a market built on exchanges that sometimes vanished, it turned out to be well timed.
What almost nobody saw coming was the speed of the climb. In 2021 the company went looking for up to $500M at about $2.5bn. The price settled lower, near $2bn, when the Series C closed in October 2022 with around $196M including convertible notes, and with Barclays on the register. That deal closed in a crypto winter. Money was available. Confidence was not.
The cost showed up in the second act. In October 2024 Tokarev handed the chief executive role to Amar Kuchinad, a former Goldman Sachs executive, and stayed on as a founder director and shareholder. Copper began applying its collateral technology to traditional finance. Then, in May 2026, Cantor Fitzgerald was hired to run a sale process marketed at $500M, a quarter of the Series C figure. Kuchinad said he would leave and work on a succession plan for 2027.
It is a sobering arc: the founder who built a risk business stepped back before his company's own valuation risk arrived. The takeaway for founders is blunt. A headline valuation is a promise about the future, not a fact about the present. What you control is whether the product solves a problem people will still have when the cycle turns.