Tiantian 'TT' Kullander: Gone at 30

On 23 November 2022, Tiantian Kullander went to sleep and did not wake up. He was 30, the co-founder of Amber Group, a crypto trading firm that investors had valued at $3 billion nine months earlier, and the father of a young son. Two days later Amber posted a short memorial titled "In Loving Memory of Tiantian Kullander". It said he had "passed away unexpectedly in his sleep". It gave no cause and no place, and none has been made public since.

The timing made his death hard to read in isolation. FTX, the exchange run by Sam Bankman-Fried, had filed for bankruptcy on 11 November, twelve days before. Prices were falling, lenders were freezing withdrawals and firms across the industry were counting what they had lost. Kullander, known to everyone in the business as TT, died in the middle of it.

A trader who built a unicorn

Kullander came to crypto from Wall Street's Asian trading floors. ABC News reported that he began his career as a trader at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. At Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong he worked on the fixed-income desk, which trades bonds and similar debt, alongside the colleagues who would found Amber with him, according to Bloomberg's 2021 profile of the firm.

Amber grew out of a side project in trading algorithms that the group started in 2015. The company dates its founding to 2017; Bloomberg gave 2018. Its business was what a market maker does on a stock exchange: standing ready to buy and sell so that others can trade, and earning a small margin each time. In crypto it also offered lending and yield products to wealthy clients and institutions, mostly in Asia. In 2021 Kullander was its chief financial officer.

The firm grew fast. In June 2021 Bloomberg reported that a $100 million funding round, with investors including Tiger Global, Pantera Capital and Coinbase, had lifted Amber's value tenfold to $1 billion in about 18 months, the threshold at which a startup is called a unicorn. In February 2022 the Singapore state investor Temasek joined a further round that valued Amber at $3 billion. Forbes had already put Kullander on its 30 Under 30 Asia list for finance and venture capital in 2019. ABC News reported that he also sat on the board of the esports team Fnatic and founded KeeperDAO, a decentralised finance app, before handing it to its users.

The announcement

Amber's tribute called him "instrumental to the founding of Amber and a pillar of our success". He was survived by his wife and son, ABC News reported. Annabelle Huang, a fellow crypto executive, wrote that he was "a rare mix of both a scholar and a degen", crypto slang for a heavy risk-taker.

The lack of detail left a gap, and speculation filled it. The South China Morning Post noted that his death set off conspiracy theories because it followed, by less than a month, the death of Nikolai Mushegian, a 29-year-old developer who drowned off Puerto Rico in October 2022 after posting fears for his safety. Two days after Kullander died, Vyacheslav Taran, co-founder of the trading platform Libertex, was killed in a helicopter crash in the south of France. No evidence has ever linked any of these deaths to each other, to FTX or to foul play. Taran's crash was later ruled an accident. Kullander's family and company have not discussed how he died, and nothing in the public record says more than the company's statement.

What happened to Amber

Amber had money at FTX, though the firm said it was less than 10% of its trading capital. It said it had no exposure to FTX's own token or to Alameda Research, Bankman-Fried's trading firm, but that it "did have to rebalance some positions". The cost showed up anyway. The Block reported that Amber had been cutting staff since September 2022 and TechCrunch, citing Bloomberg, reported that it would cut about 40% of its workforce, roughly 300 people. It cut management pay and bonuses and dropped a sponsorship deal with Chelsea Football Club.

In December 2022, three weeks after Kullander's death, Amber announced a $300 million funding round led by Fenbushi Capital US. Bloomberg reported that it valued the company at less than the earlier $3 billion, and that most of the money would go to clients who had lost money on an Amber product because of FTX's collapse. A planned round at the $3 billion valuation had been abandoned after a partial closing of $50 million.

The business he co-founded survives in a smaller form. In March 2025 Amber's wealth management arm, Amber Premium, merged into iClick Interactive, a company already listed on Nasdaq, the American stock market. The combined company, renamed Amber International Holding, began trading under the ticker AMBR on 13 March 2025. The deal valued the Amber business at $360 million, according to the law firm Simpson Thacher, which advised on it. That is about an eighth of the $3 billion the whole group was valued at in February 2022, though the two figures cover different slices of the business.

What is known is narrow. A 30-year-old who had helped build one of Asia's largest crypto trading firms died in his sleep in the worst month the industry had seen. He left a wife and a son. The cause belongs to his family, who have kept it private.