Amid rapid growth, Copper expands its platform to help teens build long-term wealth
Copper set out to become teens’ bank account of choice while giving them a solid grounding in financial literacy. Now it has an even broader goal: to give teens their first experience with investing and help them learn how to build wealth.
Just seven months after closing its seed round, Copper is announcing $29M in Series A funding led by Fiat Ventures with participation from Panoramic Ventures, Insight Partners, Invesco Private Capital and all existing investors. The new round brings Copper’s total investment to $42.3M. Copper will use the funds to expand its banking service into a full-featured, teen-friendly financial platform.
Later this year, Copper customers will gain the ability to direct funds from their FDIC-backed accounts into a wide range of investments, from individual stocks to mutual funds to cryptocurrency.
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The idea, said Copper CEO Eddie Behringer, is to create a supervised environment where teens can learn as they invest, and where parents can see where every dollar is going.
“We provide complete transparency,” Behringer said. “We give parents alerts and smart controls so they always know how their children are spending and saving. At the same time, we give teens the freedom to experiment with money — and even make mistakes — before entering the adult world.”
Since its launch in 2019, Copper has become one of the largest and most successful teen-oriented banking services in the United States. With more than 800,000 users, 24,000 reviews and an average rating of 4.9 on the Apple App Store, Copper offers features like personalized debit cards, access to 50,000 ATMs and support for digital wallets like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Samsung Pay. Parents use Copper to send money to teens and monitor their teens’ spending. Teens can set up direct-deposit for after-school and summer jobs and pay friends using convenient P2P transfers, while getting tips on finance fundamentals like dividends, budgeting and compound interest.
Copper receives more than 60% of new customers from organic word of mouth, with growth fueled by a unique in-school acquisition strategy similar to the one Copper’s founders used to build Snap! Raise, the largest fintech fundraising platform for parents and teens. This approach to customer acquisition results in costs less than a third of those of its chief competitors.
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Now Copper plans to apply that same successful approach to investment. A recent survey of American teens found half were skeptical that the stock market was a “good thing for ordinary people,” and 37% wouldn’t invest in stocks if given the funds. Nevertheless, most would make some kind of investment, with large proportions choosing cryptocurrency or real estate.
“Teens are intensely curious about investing. They just don’t have experience weighing risks or balancing a portfolio,” said financial advisor and Copper Executive Director of Financial Education Liz Frazier Peck. “That’s why it’s essential to get them comfortable with the different options early on — ideally in a space where they’re surrounded by good advice and can be supervised by their parents. Copper is like a drivers permit. It gives teens experience ‘behind the wheel,’ but there’s always an adult in the passenger seat.”
“Copper is building something bigger than banking for teens. The vision, team and growth model are built different, built to win and built to reshape the next generation’s financial future like never before,” said Alex Harris, General Partner Fiat Ventures.
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