By
Steve Muchoki
April 19th, 2024
The company said that it took them longer-than-expected to secure the funding due to the crypto winter of 2022.
On Wednesday, October 12, London-based crypto custodian Copper announced securing $196 million in the latest Series C funding. As per the company filing, the crypto custodian raised $181 million from new and existing shareholders besides a convertible loan note of $15 million.
The company, however, hasn’t declared at what valuations it undertook this fundraising. Copper specializes in offering infrastructure for storing digital assets to institutions such as State Street and FTX. For the last year of 2021, the company declared a loss of £14.4 million ($15.95 million). This was significantly greater than the £3.7 million loss in the previous year i.e. 2020.
During the recent funding round, Copper did not name the list of investors that participated in the funding. However, some of the previous investors in the crypto custodian include Accel, SoftBank Group, Tiger Global, and Barclays Plc. According to people familiar with the matter, Accel and SoftBank did not participate in Copper’s recent funding round.
The investment has been a long-drawn process as Copper struggled to convince investors in the massive crypto winter of 2022. Due to the massive correction in crypto this year, investments have dried up to a great extent.
As per Bloomberg, Copper was initially seeking to raise $500 million at a $3 billion valuation when Bitcoin was trading at its all-time high last November 2021. However, we all know how crypto prices have crashed over the last year drying up all investments in this space.
A Copper spokesperson declined to comment on the current valuation of the company. During their fundraising effort this year in July, Copper Chief Executive Dmitry Tokarev said:
“It just generally took longer than we expected to basically make sure that there is a full clarity as to what’s going on, and how things are”.
Copper’s Regulatory Approvals
Previously, Copper approached the Financial Conduct Authority to seek permission to continue offering crypto services in the UK. But earlier this year in March, the company decided to withdraw its application after securing similar approvals in Switzerland.
As said, the company has been raising cash in an increasingly tough market. VC participation in the crypto space has been on a decline throughout this year. During the third quarter of 2022, investment by VC firms plunged by $4.44 billion.