Original name:
London, United Kingdom
21.07.1983
Viktor Prokopenya was born in Belarus in a family of academics. His father left science because of low earnings and went into business.
Viktor lost his father early (died in the car accident), and being a high school student, worked part-time to help his family.
In 2000, he graduated from the gymnasium and entered the university. He received higher education in nine leading universities worldwide, including Stanford University. His specialisations are programming, law, economics, finance, marketing, management and psychology. He holds a PhD in Business Administration and a DBA in Behavioural Economics.
At 15, Viktor Prokopenya developed a method of automatically submitting applications for several freelance projects. It helped him buy his deceased father’s firm from its co-owners at 17.
He’s been in the technology business since he was 18.
At 18, he opened a technology company, which employed more than 100 people two years later. In 2011, Prokopenya sold it for €100 million.
In 2012, Viktor founded the investment company VP Capital. One of the fund’s projects, the mobile division was sold by the businessman in 2014.
Prokopenya’s most significant project is financial and technological trading platform Capital.com. Capital.com was founded by him in 2016 and has 7 million customers, and use proprietary artificial intelligence algorithms to trade financial instruments.
In addition to technological projects, VP Capital supports media projects. For example, the company invested $1M in IT media Dev.by: in 2017 and 2021. At the same time, the Dev.media news agency was created, which included Dev.ua, Dev.by and other projects.
Married, has three sons. Together with family lives in London and holds British citizenship.
Viktor Prokopenya participated in the development of legal conditions for the development of innovative technologies in Belarus.
In December 2018, he presented 600 tablets with digitised school curricula in Russian and Belarusian languages to schoolchildren in Belarusian regions. A few months later, he publicly spoke out about the low level of training of Belarusian schoolchildren and students and proposed his vision of education reform.
Prokopenya supports cultural and historical projects. Actively endorse the preservation and development of the Belarusian language by sponsoring Belarusian-language publications and projects: magazines “Vyaselka” and “Nasha Historia”, the Giedroyc Prize for Writers, Nasha Spadchyna project, etc.
Sponsors the Francysk Skaryna Museum-Library in London, whose collection is the largest in Western Europe.
Openly criticises the policy of the Belarusian leaders – from inaction during the pandemic to the brutal suppression of protesters after the presidential election in August 2020.
Allocated $100,000 each for protective equipment for medics during the pandemic and for rehabilitating those who suffered during the breaking up on street protests after the 2020 elections.
Publicly criticised the Russian invasion of Ukraine and donated $1 million to help Ukraine in the early days of the war with the Russian Federation.
Viktor calls work his hobby. He reads extensively and leads an active lifestyle, playing hockey, cycling, scuba diving and snowboarding.