Athan Zhang

Athan Zhang is the CEO and Founder of Copperlane, where he leads product and engineering at the intersection of artificial intelligence and financial services. He focuses on building systems that apply advances in AI to complex, real-world workflows, with particular emphasis on AI safety, performance, and thoughtful integration into existing operational environments.

Prior to Copperlane, he was a quantitative developer at Five Rings, a proprietary trading firm, where he worked on high-performance systems in fast-moving financial markets. He was also an early founding engineer at two startups, including one that was acquired and another that raised millions in venture funding. Athan studied computer science at Princeton.

With family roots in the mortgage industry, he developed an early appreciation for the challenges and complexity of the loan process. Athan is also a licensed mortgage loan officer. His work at Copperlane focuses on applying modern AI techniques to legacy financial systems, with the goal of improving efficiency while maintaining the rigor required in highly regulated environments.