Amber Group

Chief Investment Officer Wayne Huo oversees investment strategy and portfolio allocation across the firm's market-making, structured-product and venture books. Huo was part of the five-person founding group that left Morgan Stanley's fixed-income trading desk to build the firm in 2017. CEO Michael Wu continues to shape macro-level risk limits and capital allocation between the proprietary and client-facing businesses.

It operates as a hybrid. The firm runs a proprietary balance sheet for market-making and principal positioning, but its institutional arm raises external capital for structured products and yield strategies. This dual model is more common in traditional macro hedge funds — Citadel Securities plus Citadel the fund — than in the digital-asset sector, where most firms pick one structure.

The five co-founders all held VP or ED roles in Morgan Stanley's fixed-income division before leaving in 2017 to trade crypto full-time. Their training in risk systems, structured-product design and electronic market infrastructure meant Amber built compliance and middle-office functions early — years before the 2022 industry deleveraging forced competitors to retrofit controls.

The venture team co-invests alongside other liquid-token funds and developer-focused VCs, sourcing primarily through market-making relationships that give early visibility into protocol liquidity and developer activity. Confirmed portfolio companies include dYdX and Biconomy (per The Block, 2022–2023).

Tiantian Kullander died unexpectedly in November 2022 at age 30, a loss that occurred just weeks before Amber announced its Series C funding round. CEO Michael Wu communicated the round's continuation to investors, and the $300 million raise from Fenbushi Capital and other investors closed in December 2022 (per Bloomberg, December 2022).

The firm provides liquidity across Asia-Pacific and Middle Eastern exchanges through its Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai offices, and covers North American counterparties from New York. Its regulatory posture is entity-level for each jurisdiction rather than a single global license.

The firm has stated that proprietary trading capital and externally managed asset pools sit in segregated legal entities. The structured-products book and yield strategies face external LPs through separate vehicles, while the market-making desk operates on the firm's own capital, similar to the structure of proprietary trading firms in traditional finance.