Last night Bloomberg reported that Alan Howard plans to sell some of his personal crypto investments to beef up investment in Brevan Howard Digital, the crypto arm of the asset manager that he co-founded. According to sources, he is looking to sell stakes in digital asset custody firm Copper.co, Austrian crypto exchange Bitpanda and potentially others.
The timing may be opportunistic as Copper appears to be gearing up for another funding round. According to company filings, at the start of the year the company passed a resolution to allot shares and remove pre-emption rights. Mr Howard invested in Copper’s Series C funding round in 2021 / 2022. The funding attracted numerous backers, including Barclays Bank, and was announced as $196 million. There were unconfirmed reports of a $2 billion valuation.
Mr Howard has a significant investment in another digital asset custody firm, Komainu, a joint venture between Nomura’s Laser Digital, Coinshares and wallet technology firm Ledger. He led the $25 million Series A funding round.
The Komainu investment was made via another Howard web3 entity, Elwood Technologies. It’s an institutional crypto trading infrastructure also backed by Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Citi and CommerzVentures.
Additionally, he owns web3 incubator WebN, which has a joint venture with Laser Digital, the fund tokenization protocol Libre. Brevan Howard will be one of the first asset managers to use the protocol.
