Copper Banking Raises $9M in Seed Funding

Teen-focused digital banking service Copper Banking on Wednesday (Oct. 6) announced it has raised a total of $13.3 million in seed funding after recently completing a $9 million round that followed last year’s $4.3 million infusion of fresh capital, according to a TechCrunch report.

PSL Ventures, an arm of Pioneer Square Labs, was the investment leader in both fundraising rounds. Copper Banking also got financial backing from Clocktower Ventures, Index Ventures Scout Fund, Launchpad Capital, Financial Venture Studio, Maven Ventures, Fiat Ventures and Arnold Ventures.

Copper Banking will use the seed funding to further develop its banking platform and products and enhance its go-to-market strategy, including the hiring of more employees in engineering, compliance, marketing, sales and operations on top of the current headcount of 25.

“We worked with millions of teens and parents in our previous company,” Copper Banking CEO and Co-founder Eddie Behringer told TechCrunch, referring to youth-oriented crowdfunding platform Snap! Raise.

“That playbook is one of the core reasons we’ve seen such great growth so quickly,” he said. “We’ve gone this route before — partnering at the community level. That’s something that is typically overlooked in tech models today.”

Copper Banking embeds financial education into its platform so that its 350,000 young users can better manage their money. The app can translate what young customers want to do with their money into savings goals, said Behringer.

The company leans on youth ambassadors to promote the Copper Bank app to their fellow club members and teammates. “We realized when growing Snap! Raise that very little had been done to prepare this generation to be financially successful,” Behringer told TechCrunch. “One of the first things we noticed is that banks have set the bar extremely low for pre-18 banking.”

Related news: 49% of US Consumers Interested in Digital Banking Services from Larger Firms

More than four out of five consumers (82%) connect to their bank account(s) through digital methods – and the share of consumers who bank primarily via a mobile app is four times as large as the share of those who interact with their accounts mainly at a physical branch, according to “Digital Banking: The Brewing Battle for Where We Will Bank,” a PYMNTS and Optherium collaboration.

More than two in five (42%) of our 2,255 survey respondents say they use mobile apps, and 26% report that computers are their main means of accessing their accounts.