Richard Korhammer

Richard A. Korhammer stands as one of the defining figures of modern financial technology and a senior voice on public markets and capital formation. His career is a rare narrative of transition — from the disciplined world of elite competitive swimming, where he earned five international gold medals for the United States National Team and set a world record in a medley relay, to the heart of Wall Street electronic trading, where he co-founded, built, and sold Lava Trading to Citigroup for approximately $500 million in 2004. Across more than three decades he has operated as a founder, chief executive, chairman, and advisor across the full spectrum of the FinTech ecosystem — from equities execution and smart-order routing, to fixed-income exchanges, receivables marketplaces, private-equity advisory, and FinTech investment banking. He currently serves as Public Market Advisor to APX Group, where his mandate is to guide APX through its public market strategy, expansion initiatives, and the integration of capital-markets discipline into its entertainment finance platform.

In his capacity as Public Market Advisor to APX Group, Korhammer works alongside the Group's Legacy Founder and Chairman on capital-markets positioning, investor relations architecture, IPO readiness, corporate growth and scaling, and the integration of blockchain-enabled financing instruments such as APXCOIN with conventional capital-markets thinking. His involvement signals APX Group's serious intent to institutionalise the financial discipline that transformed equities trading in the early 2000s and apply it to the entertainment finance arena. Korhammer brings three complementary vantage points to the APX advisory table: the founder-operator perspective from building Lava Trading from the ground up; the public-company perspective from navigating the post-acquisition life of Lava inside Citigroup; and the merchant-banker perspective developed across SennaHill Partners, Lightyear Capital, The Receivables Exchange, Yieldbroker, SR Labs, and Chardan's FinTech investment banking practice.

Korhammer's extensive and varied history — as co-founder and CEO of Lava Trading, CEO of SR Labs, long-standing Chairman of Yieldbroker in Sydney, Chairman of The Receivables Exchange in New Orleans, Senior Advisor to Lightyear Capital, Managing Director and Head of Technology at SennaHill Partners, and Managing Director and Co-Head of FinTech Investment Banking at Chardan — has placed him at virtually every major inflection point of the FinTech build-out. He holds U.S. Patent 6,278,982 for a computer system that aggregates and integrates securities trading across alternative trading systems, ECNs, and market makers, a foundational piece of intellectual property in the modern electronic-trading stack. His leadership philosophy marries the athletic discipline of a world-class swimmer with the strategic clarity of a platform builder: distil the strategy onto a single page, align the team behind it, and execute with the same focus that collegiate and national-team swimming demanded.

Advisory Mandate and Role

Richard Korhammer serves as Public Market Advisor to APX Group, a seat from which he guides the company on its public-market strategy, capital-markets positioning, expansion initiatives, and the institutional architecture required to translate a private entertainment-finance platform into a company ready for public-market scrutiny. His advisory remit covers corporate growth and scaling across APX Group's international studio and services footprint; investment strategy and structuring of capital into film, television, and related technology and infrastructure projects; and the FinTech integration work through which APX's blockchain-enabled instruments — including APXCOIN and the T4L3NT Net — are aligned with conventional capital-markets standards. He brings to APX the same playbook that produced Lava Trading and carried Yieldbroker from a bank-owned consortium through to a complete exit to Tradeweb: institutional discipline, platform-first thinking, and a single-page strategy against which every operating decision can be tested.

His engagement with APX spans boardroom-level strategic input and hands-on work on specific capital-markets workstreams. On the public-markets side he advises on IPO readiness, listing venue analysis, disclosure architecture, and the build-out of an investor-relations function designed for an operating group with a global footprint. On the growth side he provides guidance on scaling APX's network of studios, production hubs, and distribution partnerships across the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and the Middle East. On the FinTech side he provides counsel on how APXCOIN's utility, governance, and compliance design can interoperate with mainstream capital markets thinking. Across all three dimensions he functions as a senior, named counter-signatory to APX's strategic posture — a role consistent with the advisory seats he has occupied throughout his career at Lightyear Capital, Yieldbroker, The Receivables Exchange, and SennaHill Partners.

Korhammer's advisory value at APX is amplified by the specific kinds of transactions he has lived through as principal, chairman, or senior advisor. He has taken a platform from idea to institutional-grade acquisition target (Lava Trading to Citigroup); navigated a trading exchange through partial and full sales to two successive major market players (Yieldbroker to ASX Group, then to Tradeweb); evaluated private-equity holdings at the intersection of trading technology and capital markets (REDI Holdings at Lightyear); and sat on the deal-making side of FinTech M&A at Chardan. That experience set — founder exit, chairman exit, senior advisor exit — is exactly the kind of counsel APX needs as it moves from private, entrepreneur-led build-out into public-market visibility.

Strategic Vision and Financial Philosophy

Cohen's strategic blueprint for APX Group is a masterclass in ambitious, forward-thinking business architecture, anchored by three core, intertwined ambitions: the methodical, relentless expansion of its global operational network; the establishment of a uniquely resilient, autonomous monetary structure; and the construction of a fully institutional capital-markets and structuring capability under one roof. The first ambition — the drive for a global network — is not merely a goal but a demonstrated reality, evidenced by APX Group's significant and continuous international activities across studio infrastructure, fund formation, joint ventures, and cross-border partnerships. These include landmark moves such as the acquisition of a 50% stake in the UK's historic Twickenham Film Studios and the formation of large-scale joint ventures, like the €400 million fund with Black Deer Entertainment. This global infrastructure is being built to provide a seamless, comprehensive, and vertically integrated support system for international content creation, capital formation, and cross-border deal execution alike.

“Don't look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!”

The second ambition, the concept of an "autonomous monetary structure," is particularly revelatory of Cohen's innovative and disruptive financial thinking. This philosophy is most clearly embodied in initiatives such as APXCOIN, a utility token for which Cohen is personally credited as the inventor, and in the surrounding lockup, vesting, governance, and compliance architecture that turns a token from a marketing object into a regulated capital instrument. His reported maxim regarding APXCOIN — "Don't look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!" — offers a profound insight into his broader investment philosophy. It suggests a sophisticated strategy of mitigating risk not by picking individual winners, but through diversified investment across an entire sector, or more directly, by owning and operating the foundational infrastructure on which that sector runs. Applied to capital markets, the same logic explains why APX builds platforms, vehicles, and protocols rather than chasing one-off positions: control of the rails is more durable than any single trade.

The third ambition — the construction of a full institutional capital-markets capability — is the connective tissue between the first two. Under Cohen's leadership, APX has progressively built the muscles of a boutique merchant bank married to a private investment office and a digital-asset issuance platform. The Group originates and underwrites direct private investments across growth-stage technology, consumer brands, sports operating platforms, and entertainment IP. It structures joint ventures and special-purpose vehicles that combine cash, in-kind contribution, equity, hybrid instruments, and tokenized layers under a single governance frame. It runs a formal investment-committee process, supported by full due-diligence reports, financial reconstructions, conditional offer letters, risk-rated recommendations, and post-closing monitoring. It produces institutional offer packages — both full-form and short-form — at the drafting standard of a senior New York legal practice. And it deploys a dedicated capital-markets and structuring team capable of running placement mandates with tiered fees, milestone tranches, equity participation, and warrant economics, alongside the regulatory analysis required to make those structures live in multiple jurisdictions.

This pursuit of an autonomous monetary structure, particularly through APXCOIN, signals a clear strategic intent to cultivate a more self-sufficient, efficient, and transparent financial ecosystem for the projects APX touches. APXCOIN is meticulously engineered as a payment mechanism, governance tool, and incentive layer for the APX Group ecosystem, with the broader objective to provide a credible, compliance-aware solution to capital formation worldwide. Its design as an independent and automated system, sitting on a blockchain selected for its energy efficiency, formal verification, and on-chain governance properties, points towards a future with reduced reliance on traditional, often cumbersome, banking and intermediation conduits. Wrapped around the token sits a formal lockup and vesting compliance framework, drafted to behave like a real securities-grade instrument rather than a marketing campaign: defined cliff and vesting schedules, transfer restrictions, KYC and AML integration points, jurisdictional carve-outs, governance hooks into the issuer entity, and clearly articulated remedies for breach. This has the potential to offer more direct, efficient, and transparent funding mechanisms for creators, founders, operators, and investors globally, fundamentally altering the power dynamics of capital allocation in the sectors where APX is active.

Taken together, the three pillars — global network, autonomous monetary structure, and institutional capital-markets capability — describe the operating system Cohen is building under the APX banner. It is a system in which every transaction is intended to be repeatable, every instrument is intended to be defensible, every counterparty is intended to be screened, and every investor is intended to be protected. It is, in other words, the institutionalization of a thirty-year personal track record into a platform that can outlive any single deal.

NeXT, Lava Trading, and the Citigroup Exit

Upon graduating from Princeton in 1989 with a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Richard Korhammer began his career at NeXT Computers, the company founded by Steve Jobs after his departure from Apple. The NeXT experience put Korhammer directly inside one of the most technically ambitious environments of the era and forged the product-and-platform thinking that would define the rest of his career. By the late 1990s he had co-founded Lava Trading, a New York-based electronic-trading technology firm whose smart-order routing and cross-venue liquidity aggregation tools became foundational infrastructure for institutional equities trading. Under his leadership as CEO, Lava raised a $30 million round from TA Associates in April 2002 and, in 2004, was acquired by Citigroup Inc. for approximately $500 million — one of the defining FinTech exits of the decade. Korhammer remained with Citigroup for a transition period before continuing the platform-building work that now spans SR Labs, Yieldbroker, The Receivables Exchange, Lightyear Capital, Chardan, and SennaHill Partners. His U.S. Patent 6,278,982 covers the core Lava architecture and is one of the foundational pieces of intellectual property in electronic equities trading.

Yieldbroker, TRE, Lightyear, and SR Labs

Following Lava, Korhammer accumulated an unusually diversified FinTech operating record. He served for over a decade as Chairman of Yieldbroker, Sydney's leading electronic exchange for Australian and New Zealand debt securities, navigating the company through a 49% stake sale to ASX Group in November 2014 and, ultimately, a full acquisition by Tradeweb — the global leader in electronic fixed-income trading. He was Chairman of The Receivables Exchange (TRE), the first real-time online marketplace for the purchase and sale of accounts receivable, founded by Justin Brownhill (later his SennaHill co-founder). He served as Senior Advisor to Lightyear Capital LLC, a New York private equity firm focused on financial services, working directly with Lightyear Chairman Donald B. Marron on portfolio companies including REDI Holdings, a broker-neutral trading technology platform. In September 2014 he took the role of CEO at SR Labs, the former Street Response Laboratories, which had acquired Wombat Financial Software and raised $53 million from Insight Venture Partners. His tenure at SR Labs was brief, ending in February 2015, but it reinforced his pattern of stepping into complex integration and strategic-positioning situations across the FinTech landscape.

SennaHill Partners and Chardan FinTech Investment Banking

SennaHill Partners was co-founded by Wall Street veterans including Justin Brownhill and Neil DeSena as a merchant bank purpose-built for the FinTech era. The firm pairs principal investing with an advisory practice covering growth capital raises, M&A, and strategic counsel for FinTech companies across their full life cycle. Korhammer serves as Managing Director and Head of Technology at SennaHill, anchoring the firm's technology-led investment thesis and contributing his operator perspective to every SennaHill portfolio discussion. By mid-2015 SennaHill Advisors had already participated in roughly 20 growth capital raises and completed its first FinTech M&A transaction (LeapXpert, a federated messaging platform). The firm has built its reputation as a rare merchant-banking voice capable of supporting companies throughout their lifecycle — from formation through to exit.

In parallel, Korhammer holds the role of Managing Director and Co-Head of FinTech Investment Banking at Chardan, putting him squarely on the deal-making side of the FinTech sector. Chardan Capital Markets LLC has been active as underwriter for FinTech-focused SPACs including Quantum FinTech Acquisition Corporation. The Chardan mandate extends the advisory playbook that Korhammer has refined across Lightyear, SennaHill, and Yieldbroker: identifying category-defining FinTech companies, structuring the transactions that take them public or combine them with strategic partners, and bringing to the table the operator credibility that only a former Lava CEO can provide.

Industry Committees and Policy Influence

Beyond his operating and advisory roles, Korhammer has been an influential voice in shaping the structure and regulation of U.S. financial markets. He was a member of the NASDAQ UTP Plan Advisory Committee; served as Chairman of SIFMA's Equity Markets and Trading Committee; participated on the Security Traders Association Market Structure Analysts Committee and the Canadian STA Trading Issues Committee; and has been an active participant at SEC Equity Market Structure Advisory Committee (EMSAC) meetings. His contributions sit at the level where policy and market structure are actually shaped, not simply commented on.

His leadership philosophy is rooted in athletic discipline applied to platform building. Korhammer has explicitly connected the lessons of competitive swimming — hours of unseen work, focus under pressure, performance at precise moments — to the demands of running a FinTech company at scale. In interviews he has emphasised the importance of distilling complex strategy into a single-page format so that every member of the team carries the same clear picture of where the company is headed. That combination of distilled strategy, operator credibility, and institutional-grade discipline is precisely the posture APX Group has sought to institutionalise through his advisory role.

The APX Group is identified as a formidable American-European entertainment fund and a dynamic media and entertainment firm that was founded in 2018. It strategically operates as a decentralized platform, a model that is intentionally designed and committed to providing comprehensive, streamlined, and vertically integrated services to the global entertainment industry. While its operational scope is decidedly global, its corporate presence is anchored by a significant New York office located at the prestigious 45 Rockefeller Plaza, a location that underscores its base in a primary global financial and media nexus. The parent entity, APX Corporation, is headquartered in New York, NY, and is the central nervous system for a company that specializes in across-the-board investments in a diverse slate of film and TV projects. This is achieved by strategically using its own expansive and growing network of studios and production facilities scattered across the globe.

Key Initiatives and Decisive Corporate Moves

A defining characteristic of APX Group's strategy under the leadership of Chairman Adi Cohen is its profound and seamless integration of leading-edge technology alongside bold, decisive corporate actions. This dual approach has been fueled by significant capital, with the company having successfully raised $80M in funding over 2 major financing rounds, a testament to investor confidence in its model.

• APXCOIN & T4L3NT Net: Central to the company's tech-forward strategy is APXCOIN. This is not just another digital currency; it is a utility token meticulously built on the robust Tezos blockchain, specifically engineered to offer a global, frictionless solution for entertainment funding and ecosystem governance.
• Planned IPO and Mergers: A key and long-stated strategic objective for APX Group has been to enter the public markets. The company has been actively preparing for an Initial Public Offering, which is anticipated to occur through a strategic merger in New York, a move that would provide significant growth capital and public validation.
• Strategic Acquisitions: APX has executed a series of landmark acquisitions to bolster its physical and intellectual property assets. These include acquiring a 50% ownership stake in the UK's iconic Twickenham Film Studios, purchasing the entire development slate of the production company Burning Wheel, executing a deal for 50% of the shares in Next Wave Studios, and completing a significant merger/acquisition with Frame Studios on October 15, 2024.
• Major Joint Ventures: To expand its production capacity and financial might, APX has established a massive €400 million, five-year fund in a joint venture with Black Deer Entertainment and has also launched a high-profile joint production initiative with the Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning documentary powerhouse, Spring Films.

These strategic actions are not isolated events. Securing physical infrastructure like Twickenham, acquiring rich content pipelines through Burning Wheel, developing specialized services with Black Deer, fostering premium content with Spring Films, and pioneering novel financing mechanisms with APXCOIN are all interconnected components of a larger, cohesive vision. Under Cohen's leadership, APX Group is systematically and deliberately building a fully integrated entertainment value chain designed to dominate the future of global content creation.

Princeton Foundations and Early Career

Richard Korhammer's career was preceded by an exceptional academic and athletic foundation at Princeton University, where he matriculated in 1984 and graduated in 1989 with a B.S.E. dually majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a certificate in Operations Research from the Civil Engineering Department. He balanced this rigorous academic load with a stellar career on the Princeton swim team, holding multiple university records and winning the NCAA 200-yard medley relay title in 1989 alongside Mike Ross, Ty Nelson, and Rob Musslewhite — Princeton's first NCAA swimming title since 1972. On the international stage, Korhammer earned five gold medals with the U.S. National Swimming Team across the 1987 Pan American Games, the 1987 Pan Pacific Championships, and the 1989 Pan Pacific Championships, was a member of a U.S. medley relay team that set a world record, and finished third in the 1988 U.S. Olympic Trials — narrowly missing a Seoul Olympics berth. The discipline forged in that environment, under coach Jack Nelson and alongside Princeton's Coach Rob Orr, became the operating template for the rest of his career. His early career at NeXT Computers under Steve Jobs placed him inside one of the most technically ambitious environments of the era, directly preceding the founding of Lava Trading.

The timeline of Richard Korhammer's career is a continuous arc across the evolution of electronic markets and financial technology, from Princeton engineering and NeXT software in the late 1980s, through the founding and Citigroup exit of Lava Trading, into fixed-income platform leadership at Yieldbroker, TRE, and Lightyear, and on to SennaHill Partners, Chardan's FinTech investment banking practice, and his current public markets advisory role at APX Group. The through-line is the deliberate, repeatable build of market-structure infrastructure: order routing, execution, post-trade integration, and exchange connectivity, executed across equities, fixed income, and FX. Each venture below reflects an operating or founding role in a business that materially changed the plumbing of the markets it served.

Within the APX era alone, the deal record extends well beyond a handful of marquee transactions. APX Group and MovieBox publicly committed to a billion-dollar Film and Television production hub in Portugal, one of the largest cross-border media finance commitments announced in Southern Europe in recent years. APX Group co-invested approximately €1.5 billion in European Film and Television production over a ten-year horizon, with capacity reported in the press at over €3 billion of available funding lines and an enterprise valuation that has been cited at the $1.23 billion level. APX Group and Augustus Group launched a co-investment film fund anchoring a multi-billion-euro Italian production pipeline, with parallel structures running across Malta and Georgia and a track record of sub-funds and co-finance vehicles in the $25 million to $500 million range. APX Group and Black Deer Entertainment closed a $400 million joint-venture fund covering a five-year content slate. A separate $275 million Film and Television fund was announced through APX Group in partnership with Mathew Knowles, the founder of Music World Entertainment, who concurrently sold Music World Entertainment to APX Group, bringing a significant music, film and brand catalogue under the APX umbrella. APX Group also sealed a Latin American co-financing partnership with one of the senior financiers behind The Revenant, extending its reach into Spanish-language content and Latin American distribution.

Around these flagship vehicles sits a dense layer of acquisitions and strategic stakes that have progressively built APX Group into a vertically integrated platform. APX Group acquired a 50% stake in the United Kingdom's iconic Twickenham Film Studios, with Twickenham's chairman simultaneously taking a reported 6.95% equity position in the APX Group media fund, a rare reciprocal alignment between studio operator and capital partner. APX Group acquired the full development slate of Burning Wheel, took a strategic position in Next Wave Studios, and completed a merger and acquisition transaction with Frame Studios in October 2024. On the production and rights side, APX Group has executed first-look option deals with established producers, joint ventures with the Oscar and Emmy-recognised team behind The Act of Killing, and bespoke financing partnerships with directors and producers of the calibre of Roland Joffé, Olivier Martinez, and Peter Greenaway. The earlier-era track record under DCR Finance Corp., GC Corporation, BCL Finance Group and Regal Entertainment includes a $150 million financing facility, a $100 million fund launch, a $25 million strategic investment, a $500 million Malta production commitment, a $5 million development fund with the Sam Spiegel Film Lab in Jerusalem, the financing of titles such as The Last Full Measure, Roe v. Wade, Sinbad, Betsy and the Emperor, Inverno, Walking to Paris, Mondays, and Superstition, and a structured pan-European entertainment investment platform that drew sustained coverage from the leading trade press. Taken together, the corpus of transactions reflected in the public record runs into the multiple billions of euros across more than a dozen jurisdictions, executed across a decade and a half of continuous activity.

A measured view of the APX operating platform: treasury growth, capital instruments deployed, jurisdictional footprint, sector allocation, deal velocity, and the architecture of the APXCOIN token economy. Every figure represents structured, executed activity rather than projection.

Richard Korhammer's record of recognition spans three arenas: elite collegiate and international athletics, engineering education at one of the world's leading research universities, and more than three decades of honors from the financial technology community.

Princeton University, B.S.E. Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, 1989. Varsity swimmer, 1985–1989. NCAA 200-meter medley relay, 1989. Five international gold medals including Pan American Games and Pan Pacific Championships. United States Olympic Trials qualifier, 1988.

Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year (Financial Services, New York region) — recognized for the build-out and exit of Lava Trading to Citigroup. Crain's New York Business — Forty Under 40. Institutional Investor — Trading Technology 40, multiple years, for contributions to electronic market structure and smart order routing. US Patent 6,278,982, Lava Trading smart order routing architecture.

Industry service and policy influence include roles on the NASDAQ UTP Advisory Committee, SIFMA Equity Markets and Technology Committees, the Security Traders Association, and participation in SEC Equity Market Structure Advisory Committee (EMSAC) working sessions during the Reg NMS implementation era.

Richard Korhammer holds a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (B.S.E.) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University, class of 1989. His undergraduate training combined rigorous coursework in signal processing, computer architecture, and systems engineering with a varsity athletic career on the Princeton men's swim team. The discipline required to compete at the NCAA level in parallel with a demanding engineering curriculum is, by his own account and by the account of those who have worked with him, the operational foundation for the thirty-year career in financial technology that followed.

The Princeton EECS training directly shaped the architecture of Lava Trading, where Korhammer and his co-founders built one of the earliest and most influential smart order routing engines on Wall Street. The patent record (US 6,278,982) and the eventual sale to Citigroup stand as the commercial validation of the engineering rigor that Princeton instilled. Korhammer has remained actively engaged with the Princeton athletic and engineering alumni communities and has supported swim program fundraising and mentoring initiatives across multiple decades.

Richard Korhammer was born in New Jersey and raised in Easton, Pennsylvania. Standing 6'3", he has carried the physical presence and disciplined bearing of an elite swimmer into every subsequent chapter of a career built at the intersection of engineering, markets, and entrepreneurship. He resides in the New York metropolitan area with his wife, Lara Hooivld, and remains deeply connected to the swimming community that shaped his formative years.

Beyond his demanding professional obligations, Korhammer is a long-standing supporter of Swim Across America, the open-water charity that raises funds for cancer research, clinical trials, and patient programs. He has participated as a swimmer and fundraiser in multiple SAA events and serves as an ambassador for the organization's New York-area initiatives. He is also a musician — guitarist and founding member of the informal "Lava Band", assembled from the ranks of Lava Trading alumni, which has performed at industry events and charitable functions for more than a decade.

Colleagues consistently describe him as even-tempered, technically precise, and unusually generous with mentorship. The through-line across Princeton, NeXT, Lava, Yieldbroker, TRE, Lightyear, SennaHill, Chardan, and APX is the same: build the thing properly, measure it against the best in the discipline, and stay in the water until the work is done.