Navigating fintech regulations with Aurimas Bakas (Episode 42)
In this episode, I sit down with Aurimas Bakas, CEO and founder of Copla.
Guests
Show notes
In this episode, I sit down with Aurimas Bakas, CEO and founder of Copla.
Aurimas Bakas is a serial fintech entrepreneur and chief executive with over two decades of experience building and scaling technology-driven businesses across Europe and globally. He is currently the co-founder of Copla, focusing on bridging the gap between cyber readiness and operational security in fintech.
Aurimas is best known for founding Paysolut, a banking technology company serving fintech scale-ups, which was successfully acquired by SumUp in 2021. His track record also includes multiple exits, such as DtecNet to MarkMonitor and Marguard to Prisync, alongside leadership roles in companies later acquired by Quaero Capital.
Earlier in his career, he played a key role in expanding international operations for Gaumina and scaling DtecNet into a global anti-piracy leader. His experience spans payments, data infrastructure, and enterprise software, complemented by executive education at UC Berkeley.
In this episode
Aurimas Bakas, on his eleventh startup after seven failures and three exits, explains how selling his core banking infrastructure company to SumUp led to founding Copla, a compliance and cyber-resilience platform for financial firms facing rules such as DORA. He describes how early customer feedback pushed Copla from cyber to compliance, how he raised its latest round, and why regulation is making finance more resilient. He also reflects on what happens after an exit.
Chapters
- 0:00Introduction and Copla
- 1:00The story behind the pink glasses
- 2:53Learning from seven failures
- 5:02How Copla started
- 10:02Regulation: brake or safeguard?
- 13:05Data centres and business continuity
- 16:16Compliance in a decentralised crypto world
- 18:59Finding the first customers
- 24:44Raising Copla's latest round
- 31:51Working with investors
- 34:36The licensing market today
- 40:18What an exit feels like
- 42:46Advice for founders
Key facts
Copla is Aurimas's eleventh startup; of the previous ten, seven failed and three had exits.
From 2012 to around 2017 he built a mobile payments network used by customers including Lloyds Bank and Mastercard, but it never found a sustainable model.
His previous core banking infrastructure company was sold to SumUp in 2021.
Copla was founded in 2023 as Cyber Upgrade and renamed Copla, short for compliance platform, after customers showed they start with compliance before cyber.
Copla first sold its service to 10–15 customers for 100–200 euros a month to test what they would pay for.
Copla raised a 6 million euro round, half from existing investors, taking total funding above 9 million across three rounds in under two years.
Copla had 1.2 million euros in annual recurring revenue at the time of the round.
Aurimas speaks with a couple of investors every week, whether or not he is raising.
Regulation such as DORA, NIS2, the AI Act and the Cyber Resilience Act will push hundreds of thousands of companies to take cyber resilience seriously; in ten years even coffee shops will need it.
Crypto firms seeking MiCA licences must also comply with DORA, which is new to them.
Regulators now favour quality over quantity when granting licences.
When raising, aim for at least half of the next round to come from existing investors who have the capacity to follow on.
Questions and answers
What do the pink glasses mean?
Copla wants to remove the rose-tinted view many financial firms have of their own cyber security.
Why do customers start with compliance?
Regulators push it, and most firms haven't yet suffered a cyber incident themselves.
What is Aurimas's advice to founders?
It is meant to be tough; resilience built through failures is the path to success.