Tiantian Kullander

Before founding Amber Group, Kullander worked in structured credit trading at Goldman Sachs and as an emerging markets trader at Morgan StanleyMorgan StanleyMorgan Stanley is an American global financial services firm that grew from an investment banking partnership into a publicly traded financial group spanning investment banking, securities trading, wealth management, and investment management.Open the full entry.⁠[1][2]

Amber Group began in 2015 as a side project of Kullander and three other traders, Michael Wu, Wayne Huo and Tony He, together with Bloomberg LP developer Thomas Zhu, with the aim of exploring the use of machine learning in trading.⁠[1]

In 2017 the founding team began working on the project full time, and Kullander formally founded Amber together with a group of former finance professionals from institutions including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.⁠[1][2]

In 2019, Kullander, then 26, was named to the finance category of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list together with Tony He and Wayne Huo as co-founders of Hong Kong’s Amber AI Group. At the time the company combined machine learning with quantitative research to trade and provide liquidity across a range of markets and instruments, with a presence in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Beijing, San Francisco and New York; the company said it executed US$45 billion in trades across all products in 2018.⁠[3][4][3][3][3]

In February 2022, Amber Group raised $200 million at a valuation of $3 billion and acquired the Japanese Bitcoin exchange DeCurret; its backers included the Singaporean state investment company Temasek.⁠[4][2]

In a statement on its website on November 25, 2022, Amber Group announced that Kullander had died unexpectedly in his sleep on November 23, at the age of 30. The company did not disclose a cause of death. At the time of his death, Amber Group was in the process of raising a new round of about $100 million.⁠[2][2][2][4][5]

Amber Group said Kullander had been instrumental to the founding of the company and a pillar of its success, and had put his heart and soul into it at every stage of its growth. Industry figures including Arthur Cheong, founding partner of DeFiance Capital, posted tributes on X.⁠[6][6][1]

Besides Amber Group, Kullander sat on the board of the esports company Fnatic and founded the on-chain liquidity underwriter KeeperDAO, which he later gave back to its community.⁠[6][6][7]

Amber Group: Official website: https://ambergroup.io/ (opens in a new window).⁠[8]