Doron Cohen and the customers who changed the plan

Doron Cohen started with a straightforward proposition: help people move money overseas. Then the customers began behaving as though he had built something rather more specific. They were funding property investments. Their investment managers were sending distributions back. The traffic through his payments business had developed a preference, and it was pointing toward real estate.

For a founder, this is an awkward sort of good fortune. Customers are buying the product, which is encouraging. They are also quietly rewriting the business plan. Cohen had founded Covercy in 2015 to tackle the cost and inconvenience of international transfers. Within a few years, the people using it were asking him to take on the work surrounding those transfers, too.

His answer would change the company. Covercy became a platform for commercial real estate investment managers, extending from payments into fundraising, investor communications and banking. The interesting part of Cohen’s story is how willingly he describes the turn as luck. Asked in 2021 about his biggest lucky break, he gave a compact answer: “Targeting generic payments, and finding real estate…”

The customer had other plans

The sequence matters. Investors first used Covercy to meet capital calls, the requests for money that fund managers send when an investment needs financing. Managers then used the service for quarterly distributions, returning cash to investors. Once both directions of payment passed through the same business, the requests became more ambitious. Could it handle the rest of the relationship?

A payment is a particularly revealing place to meet a customer. It has an amount, a recipient and a purpose. It also has consequences when someone gets it wrong. Cohen’s opportunity lay in following that purpose beyond the transfer itself. Property investors were giving his team a practical syllabus in their industry, complete with homework.

By mid-2020, Covercy had launched its GP platform. GP means general partner, the party managing an investment; LP, or limited partner, is the investor supplying capital. Behind those tidy initials sits a considerable amount of correspondence. Money has to be requested, received, recorded and eventually returned. Each step produces another occasion for somebody to ask where things stand.

Before that launch, the team spent time learning how commercial real estate firms worked. This is an unglamorous detail, and a useful one. A payments founder could bring knowledge of moving money. Understanding the people responsible for a portfolio required a further education. The product grew out of the overlap.

Before the buildings, the currencies

Cohen had already built a business in financial software. Before Covercy, he co-founded Leverate, which supplied technology and financial solutions to foreign exchange brokerages. His career record lists him as co-CEO from 2008 to 2013 and chairman from 2014 to 2016. His studies at the Open University of Israel combined management with computer science, systems and applications.

In March 2013, he appeared in a video interview discussing social trading: the idea that traders could operate in communities with greater visibility into one another’s activity and data. The subject belonged to the brokerage business, but it offers an early glimpse of his professional concerns. Financial activity was becoming easier to see and participate in through software. The interface between people and the underlying machinery was changing.

Covercy’s first proposition addressed a different frustration within that machinery. In 2016, Cohen explained that his experience in foreign exchange had made the expense of moving money between countries hard to ignore. Small and medium-sized businesses had invoices to pay. They needed to know what a transfer would cost and how much the recipient would actually receive.

He was specific about the less photogenic work as well: licensing, anti-money-laundering processes, advisers and a back end capable of managing transactions. An agreeable screen is useful. It becomes less agreeable if the numbers behind it cannot be trusted. His account of the early company gave both sides of that problem their due.

A banker’s guest with a fintech argument

Cohen’s impatience with older payment infrastructure could be blunt. A 2016 commentary under his name criticised SWIFT’s multiple institutions and the difficulty of assigning responsibility when something went wrong. The emphasis was on accountability: customers needed a clear party responsible for the transaction, rather than a tour of the organisations involved.

Yet he also made a more cooperative argument. Speaking at the launch of an Accelerator Frankfurt programme in March 2018, he put banks and financial technology companies in the same sentence as mutual necessities. It is a useful complication in a career often described through the vocabulary of disruption. Replacing a cumbersome experience still means working within a financial system.

“Banks can’t live without Fintech, and Fintechs can’t live without Banks”.Doron Cohen · Frankfurt, 2018

That relationship became a practical feature of Covercy’s later business. The company combines software with banking services provided through a banking partner. Cohen’s route into real estate therefore carried an unusual inheritance: the company had been dealing with actual transfers before it was asked to organise an investment manager’s day.

There is a certain advantage in beginning with a task that must finish. A transfer cannot live indefinitely as a promising demonstration. It either arrives as intended or creates a problem someone must resolve. The discipline suits a business whose customers eventually wanted payments, records and investor relationships to agree with one another.

The sixteen-hour detour

One decision in Cohen’s early Covercy years began with somebody else’s pitch. He remembers a video call with Yasmin Lukatz that persuaded him to join ICON’s SV101 programme. The commitment involved a 16-hour flight and 14 days away from his office and his seven-month-old son. This was networking with a rather substantial travel component.

Looking back a decade later, he described joining ICON as one of his best business and personal decisions. He singled out the opportunities and friendships that followed. In its anniversary account, ICON included him in the programme’s first cohort and said he had never missed an SV101 retreat. It also noted that all 13 original participants were now mentoring founders across its programmes.

The anecdote supplies something a company timeline rarely catches: the price of being receptive. Leaving the office costs time. Leaving an infant son costs something harder to put in a calendar invitation. Cohen’s recollection holds both the sacrifice and the subsequent affection. A decision made while building one company became a relationship he continued to show up for.

More accounts, more people, more questions

As Covercy expanded, Cohen’s descriptions of the problem became increasingly concrete. In June 2025, he discussed firms with five to 20 properties ending up with dozens of bank accounts. Accounting and investor relations could sit apart, leaving managers to assemble a view of cash and ownership from separate systems. A portfolio of buildings could come with a second portfolio of administrative chores.

The platform’s response included external account connections, automated distributions and closer links between financial activity and investor records. These details explain the direction of Cohen’s work better than a catalogue of product names. He was following the places where a customer had to carry information from one task to the next.

The people around him changed as that ambition widened. Covercy appointed former Northern Trust executive Peter Sanchez as president in August 2025, giving him responsibility for expanding US fund banking and institutional services. In December, the company announced a partnership with NAV Fund Services, bringing fund administration expertise together with its software and banking platform.

For Cohen, those moves put experienced operators alongside the product. More complex customers bring more complex expectations. Fund accounting, reporting and investor servicing require people who understand the obligations as well as the buttons. The growing company was assembling both.

Another decision to start again

In April 2026, Cohen described a further change: rebuilding the platform for AI. His account presented the decision as a difficult one precisely because the existing business was working. Rebuilding asks a founder to accept disruption inside his own company, while customers still expect the ordinary work to happen on time.

The resulting Covercy One launched that month with Neo, an AI assistant intended to work across investment operations. The company describes report drafting, investor information and financial tasks within the same system, while retaining human decision-making authority. These are product claims and design intentions; they also make Cohen’s aspiration clear. He wants less manual preparation between a question and an informed action.

There is continuity beneath the changes. Foreign exchange software, international payments and real estate administration all involve people trying to understand and act on financial information. Cohen keeps returning to the steps between the intention and the result. The scale of the proposed solution has grown, but the irritation remains recognisable.

His advice to outsiders in 2021 was to keep iterating when people dismissed an early idea, preferably using something visual to refine it. Persistence, in that account, involved revision. Covercy’s customers had already supplied him with a fairly persuasive demonstration: they bought a way to move money, then showed him how much work was waiting on either side of it.

The business plan changed. The customers kept coming back with questions. Cohen kept finding more of the company in the answers.