About
Senior technology judgment, since 2003.
Copper & Vine is an independent technology advisory and full-stack engineering firm. For more than twenty years we have helped founders, enterprises, and the public sector build the systems they run on, and left every one of them more capable, documented, and independent than we found it.
We are not a platform reseller, and we are not a staffing shop. We are the senior team you bring in for the decisions you cannot afford to get wrong.
The founder
Rakia Finley.
Rakia Finley has spent more than twenty-five years where the hard technology calls get made: on-premise, in the cloud, and now in AI.
She founded Copper & Vine in 2003 and built one of the first orphanage-management platforms before the word “platform” was everywhere. She helped shape the Salesforce Nonprofit Starter Pack and was inducted into the Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame. She has served as a founding CTO inside a venture-backed startup, helped secure a share of a £6.2 million Innovate UK grant, and come through Techstars in London.
She brings the same thing to every engagement: senior judgment, no platform to push, and the honesty to tell you when the answer is not the one you wanted.
Rakia Finley, Founder
The team
Copper & Vine is not one person.
For every engagement, we assemble a senior team scoped to the work: fractional CTOs and CIOs, compliance architects, product strategists, and go-to-market leads. The level of operator who usually sits in an executive seat, brought in for exactly the problem in front of you.
Over more than twenty years and four hundred products, that model is how we have delivered for the Fortune 500, federal agencies, research institutions, and high-growth startups alike. You get the caliber of a large firm and the focus of a small one, with none of the platform a large firm is quietly trying to sell you.
The name
Why Copper & Vine.
Two things make electricity move: a conductor and a connection.
Copper carries the charge, and it holds what it conducts. That is the kind of system we build.
The vine is the connection. Agile and reaching, it extends past any one place, into communities, teams, and organizations, flexible enough to move, strong enough to endure. That’s how the work integrates: not bolted on, but grown in, and built to last.
The durable conductor and the agile connector. We stand in the gap between a bold idea and the moment it reaches the ground, and we leave behind something that keeps working after we’re gone.
The firm has run since 2003; it took the name Copper & Vine in 2017, when the work it described needed a name that meant something.
The independence
The independence is the product.
Deloitte recommends AWS. Accenture recommends Microsoft. Both have a platform to sell, and the recommendation tends to follow the platform.
We have none. No reseller margin, no partner quota, no back-end product steering the advice. That independence is the product. Our recommendation is the one you would make for yourself, if you had the time and the team to make it. It is the single reason a recommendation from us reads differently from one shaped by what the firm needs to move.
The method
How we think.
Every engagement runs on one method. We call it AIRE.
Audit
what you actually run on.
Integrate
only what earns its place.
Regulate
the risk before it finds you.
Evolve
on a documented cadence, so the system keeps holding up after we leave.
It is a discipline, not improvisation, and it is the reason you keep the operating record, not just the deliverable, when the engagement ends.
Read the AIRE frameworkWhat we believe
Three commitments.
01
Mission-centered
Technical and commercial execution aligned to your vision, your values, and your long-term sustainability, not ours.
02
Outcome-driven
Every sprint and deliverable ties to a named outcome, in working documents and executable frameworks that live inside your organization after we leave.
03
Transparency-first
Every system documented, every decision recorded, every deliverable transition-ready. You hold the complete operating record.
The record
Twenty years, on the record.
Founded 2003400+ products and platforms20+ yearsSalesforce MVP Hall of FameWomen- and minority-owned
Work for Salesforce, Apple, Howard University, the American Bar Association, the White House, and the Department of Energy. Delivered across the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Ghana, Nigeria, and Mexico.
In their words
“Senior, independent, and unafraid of the hard call. We left the engagement more capable than we went in.”
Kenneth Watson
CEO, HL360
The next step
Start where you stand.
You’ve seen how we think and who does the work. The best next move is the smallest one: take the Scorecard for a free read on where you stand, or request the brief, and we’ll send the detail before you decide anything.