MGM Resorts blames ‘cybersecurity issue’ for ongoing outage

Hotel and casino giant MGM Resorts has confirmed a “cybersecurity issue” is to blame for an ongoing outage affecting systems at the company’s Las Vegas properties. “MGM Resorts recently identified a cybersecurity issue affecting some of the company’s systems,” the company said in a statement posted to X, formerly Twitter, on Monday. “Promptly after detecting […]

Musk’s The Boring Company to expand Vegas Loop to 18 new stations

The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s project to build underground highways to alleviate traffic congestion, received approval Wednesday to expand its “Vegas Loop,” an underground tunnel system beneath Las Vegas that shuttles passengers via Tesla vehicles.

The expansion, approved by Clark County, Nevada commissioners, will expand the network by 25 miles, allowing for 18 new stations that extend the tunnel network out from the Las Vegas Strip corridor.

TechCrunch recently reported on the proposed expansion, which would increase the underground transport system to 65 miles of tunnels underneath Sin City designed to help people reach more casinos, retail zones, the University of Nevada Las Vegas campus and residential areas.

The system was originally planned to feature 29 miles of tunnels with 51 stations. The Vegas Loop’s current footprint is about 2.2 miles, and it includes five stops including four around the Las Vegas Convention Center and Resorts World. Westgate and Encore are currently under construction. The company said it just surpassed 1 million total passengers, and that the peak in one day was more than 32,000 passengers.

The commission approved the updated plan in a 6-1 vote after TBC attorney Stephanie Allen confirmed that the company, not the taxpayer, would fund the project entirely. Last year, TBC raised $675 million to scale Loop projects such as this one.

Commissioner Marilyn Kirkpatrick was the only one to vote against, citing concerns that the long-term transit system plan doesn’t take into account employees of resorts and casinos who have to travel into the city for work.

“I would hope there are long-term conversations on what that looks like so we can ensure that people can access it; not just the tourists,” said Kirkpatrick. “Because we have an equal amount of workers that have to go on this trip and it’s getting harder and harder for them to get there. I have received a lot of calls from my district on how long it takes to get there because of construction.”

Allen responded saying TBC had plans to expand into residential areas to the north, west and east of the strip.

Kirkpatrick also expressed concerns for the amount of infrastructure being built around the airport, and wanted to ensure that TBC was working in approval with the Federal Aviation Commission.

Some of the newly planned stations will be placed on Las Vegas Boulevard near the airport, as well as in Chinatown, at UNLV, Town Square Las Vegas and Harmon Square. A sample trip between the airport and the Las Vegas Convention Center, a 4.9-mile journey, could take five minutes and cost $10, according to Allen.

Around the same time TBC last raised funds, Musk tweeted that the company would still attempt to use the tunnels for the largely theoretical hyperloop technology, the idea that a transport system could zoom passengers and cargo in pods through low-pressure tubes at speeds of over 600 miles per hour. While the company said it would begin “full-scale” hyperloop testing last year, there has been no indication that TBC has moved forward with this technology, nor will it be implemented in the Vegas Loop.

Musk’s The Boring Company to expand Vegas Loop to 18 new stations by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

Marketing Gambling During A Pandemic

Las Vegas product managers had a problem when the pandemic hit
Las Vegas product managers had a problem when the pandemic hit

Image Credit: Mathieu Lebreton

Generally speaking, being a product manager who is in charge of getting people to go out to Las Vegas and spend their money is not all that hard of a job. Then the pandemic hit. The Las Vegas product managers all of sudden had a real problem on their hands – the product that they were selling was no longer something that people wanted. They were going to need to make some changes in order to get their customers to come back. What could they do?

Take A Chance On Las Vegas

Product managers want tourists to go to Las Vegas for its anything-can-happen aura. However, this past year, the unexpected made it seem less alluring to customers. The pandemic hit Las Vegas business hard. Now the city continues to gradually reopen after an initial total shutdown. Visitors to Las Vegas this year fell to 12.7 million from 28.4 million. Hotel-room-occupancy rates declined to 42.8% from 89.4%. Product managers have taken steps to regain some of the business lost to Covid-19. Casinos began welcoming guests back in June using rules that require face masks, social distancing and regular disinfection of all fixtures. Showrooms now can hold events and live shows for up to 250 attendees or 10% of their capacity, whichever is less. Trade shows, conventions and business meetings for up to 1,000 attendees have been approved if they are split into sections that don’t exceed 250 people.

Las Vegas product managers, meanwhile, have spent much of this year trying to strike the right tone at the right time. The challenge is for them to find ways to reach people who might be open to a little vacation, without bothering people who have other priorities at the moment. They understand that they don’t want to put a travel ad in front of somebody that’s just not in the mind-set to travel or is personally affected by Covid. In a case like that, the ad could become offensive to them. The Las Vergas product managers realize that it’s going to take time to get back to the way that things used to be. Right now Las Vegas is prepared to host small gatherings, but the larger events are virtual. The thinking is that they will be seeing a lot more hybrid meetings even as they start to invite groups back in-house. Going forward there’ll be a component of an in-person face-to-face, but also the opportunity for extended reach with digital.

The Las Vegas product managers want to maximize the square footage and in-person elements of these events. In order to make that happen, they understand that components of virtual activities will stay. Even in the Las Vegas pre-Covid days, not everybody was able to travel for every meeting or every trade show, so having a hybrid component enables greater reach. However, what the product managers have heard is that networking happens in person; relationships happen in person. This means that there will always be the in-person element to what they do.

It’s All About Change

As you might imagine, the Las Vegas product managers didn’t see the Covid-19 pandemic coming. Just like everyone else, they had plans for the year. They were just launching a new campaign – “Only Vegas.” They were expecting record numbers of visitors, both leisure and business travelers. And then, all of a sudden the pandemic hit. Las Vegas closed its doors mid-March and pulled all of its advertising. There was a three-month period of being completely closed. During that time the product managers did a lot of videos leveraging their entertainers and talent in Las Vegas – from celebrity mixologists and chefs to magicians and comedians providing both short snippets of entertainment and hope. Their goal was to stay connected, and making sure that when the time once again was right, Vegas would be on top of mind for its customers.

When Las Vegas reopened its doors, the product managers had to build awareness of two things: that Las Vegas was open, and that it had opened safely. They launched a commercial called “The Light” that showed someone flipping a switch to turn the lights back on on the Strip, and they aggregated all of the health-and-safety protocols from their partners on an easy-to-navigate landing page for their campaign platform, “Vegas Smart.” However, they wanted to make sure it wasn’t just about, “We’ve done all these health-and-safety protocols.” It was about trying to let people know that Vegas was still Vegas. That’s a big part of their storytelling on social media: shots of consumers having fun in the pool, visuals of the fun mixed drinks that you can only find in Vegas.

The product managers have had to be nimble in the markets that they target and the channels that they use. They have to make sure that they are actively targeting people who are interested in travel. One of the benefits of going digital is that while you’re not doing broad advertising in a given market you still can have a presence with the consumers there. Whether their conditions look good or not, if they’re actively searching for travel you have the ability to appear in front of them. Historically the Las Vegas product managers have been heavy on national TV buys. This has now shifted to digital video, connected TV and social media in order to be incredibly targeted about which markets and which consumers they reach. The goal is to make sure that they are still relevant. The traditional seasonal and annual planning are now considered to be long gone. Every month the product managers have to do their planning for the month.

What All Of This Means For You

Product managers are responsible for creating products that their customers both want and need. The product managers who are responsible for promoting Las Vegas have had a tough year. People may have wanted to still go to Vegas to gamble, but the Covid-19 pandemic has shut everyone down. The Las Vegas product managers had a real problem on their hands: how could they let everyone know that Las Vegas was still a place that they could go?

There’s no question that the pandemic hit Las Vegas very hard. The good news is that the city is now starting to come back. Live shows can be held and conventions and trade shows are starting to come back. One of the big challenges that the Las Vegas product managers are facing is that they don’t want to reach out to any prospective customers who are not thinking about traveling right now. The world has changed and the product managers realize that any event that they host will have a face-to-face and a virtual component to it. The Las Vegas product managers were as surprised by the pandemic as everyone else was. They spent their time creating videos showing all of the neat things that can be done in Las Vegas. As the city started to reopen, the product managers had to communicate to their customers that it was once again safe to come to Las Vegas. The advertising for Las Vegas has shifted from television to digital channels.

The good news for the Las Vegas product managers is that they still have a product that everyone wants. The challenge that they are facing is that the world in which we all live has changed a great deal. How they used to reach their potential customers has changed. Now the Las Vegas product managers have to be sure that they are reaching the right customers with the right message at the right time. This can be done, but they have to do it carefully. If they can accomplish this, then once again, what happened in Las Vegas can stay in Las Vegas!


– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™


Question For You: Do you think that the Las Vegas product managers should offer discounts to get people to visit?


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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’m pretty sure that this has happened to all of us. We’ve found something that we are interested in buying, but we can’t quite make up our mind as to if we really want to get it right now. Then all of a sudden we discover that there are only a few of this item left. We understand that if we don’t buy it right now, we may never be able to buy it. More often than I care to admit, this can cause me to make a purchase that I had been on the fence about. Product managers want to know if telling their potential customers that there are limited supplies of a product really works.

The post Marketing Gambling During A Pandemic appeared first on The Accidental Product Manager.

Elon Musk’s The Boring Company seeks to double the size of its Vegas Loop

Elon Musk’s Boring Company is doubling down on its Vegas bet, with a proposal that would expand its underground transport system to 65 miles of tunnels below the streets of Sin City.

The proposed network map, which was recently filed with the city of Las Vegas and not previously reported, depicts dozens of tunnels criss-crossing the city to reach more casinos, retail zones, the University of Nevada Las Vegas campus and, for the first time, even residential areas. The proposed transit system is comprised of 69 stations and 65 miles of tunnels, according to planning documents, plus an unknown number of Tesla vehicles.

If successful, a Loop station would be located within a few blocks of almost anywhere in central Las Vegas. Five stations would serve the University of Nevada; and Allegiant Stadium — home to the Raiders NFL team — would get extra links to the west of the city. Harry Reid International Airport would have several stations surrounding it, although none actually serving the passenger terminal.

The system also plans to have a new tunnel running parallel to the Strip with few stations on it, possibly allowing for a high-speed “express” route between the north and south of the city. A similar artery connects east and west Las Vegas.

The proposed system is ambitious in just about every way.

Today, the entire Loop features about 70 Teslas serving five stations around two miles apart. It took nearly three years to build and was largely funded by a $52.5 million contract with the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). A sixth station is expected to open this summer. One Boring Company document claims that construction could begin this summer and be complete by February 2024, although it is not clear if this refers to the full system.

The Boring Company (TBC) now faces significant financial and logistical challenges in growing the Loop from a small campus people-mover to a financially self-sustaining, city-wide transit network.

Making Vegas a 15-minute city

the boring company proposed Loop vegas

A portion of the proposed Loop network. Image credit: The Boring Company/city of Leas Vegas

TBC’s latest network map is impressive, and would put a Loop station within a few blocks of almost anywhere in central Las Vegas. Five stations would serve the University of Nevada, and Allegiant Stadium — home to the Raiders NFL team — would get extra links to the west of the city. Harry Reid airport would have several stations surrounding it, although none actually serving the passenger terminal.

The system also plans to have a new tunnel running parallel to the Strip with few stations on it, possibly allowing for a high-speed “express” route between the north and south of the city. A similar artery connects east and west Las Vegas.

These are ambitious plans, and the first potential challenge will be expanding the system from Clark County, home to the LVCC and many Strip casinos, north to the city of Las Vegas. Las Vegas has its own regulations and permitting process that TBC will have to negotiate, and there are signs that this is not going smoothly.

On March 8, a city engineer denied TBC’s initial structural engineering review for its proposed tunnels. TBC proposed a tunnel design that would allow buildings to be constructed safely above them, although only to a maximum of six stories. The engineer wrote that this was “NOT acceptable” to the city, which is planning further development in the area.

The engineer noted that TBC’s designs mix imperial and metric units, and reference design standards and building codes from abroad. “Regretfully, we do not use EU/Switzerland design codes/manuals,” wrote the engineer in a letter to TBC. “To one that has performed over 133,000 types of different reviews, it is impossible to simultaneously comply with all of the referenced [standards], many that are from other countries… It would be prudent practice [to] utilize codes, standards, referenced codes and design aids that have been used/developed in the USA.”

At one point, the engineer notes, TBC states that there is no US design code for tunnels. “But amazingly and few paragraphs below and on the same page, reference is made to US ‘code’ for tunnels. Needless to say, please correct statement in question,” he went on. The engineer also had concerns about TBC’s tunnels running close to the foundations of the iconic Strat tower, and the possibility of lithium ion battery fires within the system.

Building deeper or stronger tunnels to accommodate Las Vegas’s concerns would add expense to the project. Construction costs are not known, although Steve Davis, TBC’s CEO, did tell Las Vegas last year that stations would cost “between $1.5 and $20 million depending on the distance to the tunnel and [the] sub-station’s opulence.” Surface-level stations are the cheapest to build, and would seem to account for many of the expanded network’s new stops.

The city of Las Vegas did not provide a comment to TechCrunch, except to note that Loop construction had not yet commenced there.

Importantly, the Loop will receive no public funds for either construction or operation. This is almost unheard of in public transportation, where most systems in the United States and around the world rely on at least some public support. Instead, the Loop system will actually pay the city and Clark County a small fraction of its passenger revenues, ramping up as ridership increases. TBC raised $675 million in a Series C round last year.

How many riders?

Ridership figures for the Loop system to date have been unclear. Last June, Las Vegas City Councilwoman Olivia Diaz told a City Council meeting that the Loop system at the Las Vegas Convention Center had seen over 700,000 riders since it opened a year before. However, data extracted by TechCrunch from detailed ridership reports, obtained from the LVCC under a public records request, indicate that the system had transported just 487,700 passengers between its opening date and the middle of July 2022.

Last week, The Boring Company announced that it had transported its one millionth passenger. The LVCC would not confirm that figure, and TBC did not respond to a request for comment.

Only a small minority of those rides — between the Resorts World casino and the LVCC — have been cash rides, with passengers paying $1.50 a trip. The rest, on the LVCC campus itself, were supported by payments that LVCC makes to TBC, which include both a fixed monthly payment and variable fees depending on how many vehicles TBC operates.

Figures for 2021, obtained through a public record request, show that the price paid per passenger trip at the Convention Center varied considerably depending on how busy the LVCC was. In November 2021, during the popular SEMA car show, the average payment per passenger was just $2.67. In September, a quieter month, the average cost for a 0.8-mile trip worked out at $23.72.

When fully operational, TBC says the Loop could serve up to 57,000 passengers an hour, with sample fares of between $6 and $12 per trip. However, the franchise agreements with Clark County and Las Vegas give TBC free reign to set whatever fares it decides.

Water worries and still no driverless cabs

TBC is now based on the outskirts of Austin, Texas, where the company has built a factory to develop new boring machines, and is constructing test tunnels. Last year, it requested permission to discharge up to 142,500 gallons of treated wastewater directly into the Colorado River. Locals seem to be against the move, filing nearly 200 protests ahead of a public meeting tonight.

“Don’t let a public resource become a private dumping ground so that a global elite can add to his profit margin,” wrote one resident this morning. TBC has reportedly already been served notice of two wastewater violations.

Whatever tech is being developed in Austin, it probably doesn’t involve self-driving vehicles. There is no mention in the new planning documents of the autonomous vehicles that Musk originally touted for its Loop system.

The human drivers of the Loop’s Tesla Model X and Y vehicles are a critical part of the safety and evacuation plans that Clark County approved for the initial LVCC Loop system. Part of their job is to assist passengers along roadways and into egress shafts should there be an emergency underground.

While that will inevitably add costs for TBC, it might reassure passengers unnerved by ongoing investigations into Tesla’s Autopilot technologies – as well giving time for drivers to tell riders all about their “great leader.”

Elon Musk’s The Boring Company seeks to double the size of its Vegas Loop by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

Vegas visitors can take semi-autonomous EVs for a tour starting in 2023

Arcimoto, the maker of the three-wheeled electric Fun Utility Vehicles (FUVs), is teaming up with Faction to develop EVs that can be delivered to a customer’s hotel through a combination of low-level autonomy and tele-assist technology. The tie-up is part of an upcoming pilot in Las Vegas with GoCar Tours that will allow tourists to go sightseeing with Faction-powered FUVs.

Here’s how it’ll work: Arcimoto’s FUVs will be kitted out with Faction’s sensor suite of cameras and radar and its Level 2+ advanced driver assistance system, which handles tasks like lane assist and collision avoidance. The vehicles will also have a tablet that features GoCar’s GPS-guided tour of the Vegas strip (GoCar wants to eventually expand this tour to include Red Rock Canyon and the Hoover Dam). The vehicles will go from GoCar’s depot in the Arts District to various hotels along the strip — a straight, five-mile stretch of road with a 30 mile-per-hour speed limit. Tourists will then collect the FUVs and drive them along the tour route at their own pace before dropping themselves and the vehicles back at their hotels, whereupon the FUVs will “drive themselves” back to the GoCar depot.

I use quotations around “drive themselves” for a reason. Faction’s system can drive itself from A to B on a predetermined route and knows to stop itself if it encounters an anomaly or a task it’s not able to complete, like an object en route or an unprotected lefthand turn. But for judgement calls, it relies on the teleoperator. The teleoperator will remotely adjust the trajectory line that the vehicle is following to go around an object or into a parking lot and give the order to execute.

Arcimoto’s partnership with Faction and GoCar will originally involve about 20 vehicles starting in mid-2023, but the companies hope to expand the offering to an additional 290 vehicles across Vegas and other cities where GoCar operates, including San Francisco, San Diego and Barcelona.

Faction is a company that sees Level 5 autonomy as a research project that’s at least a decade out from actually commercializing, and teleoperation as a necessary component to scaling autonomous fleets today. The startup is building its business by focusing on doing “a right-sized tech stack with right-sized vehicles,” meaning Faction relies on a range of cameras, including a thermal camera, and radar to reach basic levels of autonomy, rather than fitting out a vehicle with expensive lidar and the latest compute systems.

“Right now our current vehicle systems are under $35,000,” Ain McKendrick, Faction’s CEO and founder, told TechCrunch. “We take about a $17,000 Arcimoto vehicle platform and we put on about $12,000 to $13,000 worth of tech. We’ve announced our partnership with Nvidia, but I don’t want their latest and greatest liquid-cooled Omniverse thing that’s going to take a trunk and a minivan to run. I want two generations back in their automotive-grade package that we can scale with.”

McKendrick said the benefit of being a “second wave autonomy company” is that Faction isn’t trying to solve for all of the edge cases just now. As it relates to its partnership with Arcimoto and GoCar, Faction is just trying to solve for replacing the human that would otherwise deliver those vehicles to customers’ hotels.

“Our goal is to be profitable at the $2 per mile price point out the gate, not to have the promise that it’ll be cost-reduced 10 years from now,” said McKendrick.

An Arcimoto FUV on the Las Vegas strip

An Arcimoto FUV on the Las Vegas strip. Image Credit: Arcimoto

Aside from the gimmicky aspect of having a tour car drive itself to a customer’s hotel, GoCar is here for the potential cost-savings to its business.

“We’ve thought about the self-serve model where people can come and help themselves to a vehicle and drive off, and we used to have multiple locations, but the economies of having these multiple locations is challenging because you don’t know where the customer is going to be,” Nathan Withrington, GoCar founder, told TechCrunch. “We might have 10 cars available at one location and the other has a waitlist of 30 people. Then moving cars across town and everything is a nightmare.”

If customers can just summon a vehicle to them, where GoCar stores them becomes a lot less important. The company will get visibility from its cars just being on the road, and it’ll be easier to clean and prep them when they’re all accounted for.

GoCar has already been working with Arcimoto to offer FUVs to tourists. Withrington says FUVs are the first type of EV the company has put in its fleet that can actually handle the range it needs, can cross bridges and is highway legal. Plus, tourists love driving them.

For Arcimoto, the partnership is a chance to expand its reach as a tourist offering for vehicles, while also building on its current partnership with Faction. The two began working together last year to build the D1, a semi-autonomous delivery vehicle based on the FUV, and have been running pilots in the Bay Area since July, according to McKendrick.

Vegas visitors can take semi-autonomous EVs for a tour starting in 2023 by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

What you might have missed at Black Hat and Def Con 2022

Hackers, researchers, cybersecurity companies, and government officials descended on Las Vegas last week for Black Hat and Def Con, a cybersecurity double-bill that’s collectively referred to as “hacker summer camp.”

This year’s cyber gathering was particularly exciting: not only did it mark Black Hat’s 25th anniversary, but also the first time since the start of the pandemic that the attendees have fully returned to the carpeted hallways of the popular security conferences. This meant that amid the mask confusion and subsequent influx of positive tests, there was a lot for the hacking community to catch up on.

We’ve rounded up some of the best announcements from the two shows.

Starlink hacked with $25 homemade modchip

A cybersecurity researcher revealed it’s possible to hack into Starlink terminals using a $25 device. Belgian security researcher Lennert Wouters took to the stage at Black Hat on Thursday to showcase how he was able to hack StarLink’s user terminals — referred to as “Dishy McFlatface” by Elon Musk’s SpaceX employees — using a homemade circuit board, or “modchip.” This gadget permits a fault injection attack that bypasses Starlink’s security system and allows access to control functions that Starlink had intended to keep locked down. Wouters revealed the vulnerability to SpaceX last year, earning his place in the company’s bug bounty hall of fame. Following his talk, SpaceX responded with a six-page paper explaining how it secures its systems along with a firmware update that “makes the attack harder, but not impossible, to execute.”

Zoom installer flaw enables root access on macOS

Thanks to the widespread shift to remote and hybrid working witnessed over the past couple of years, Zoom has become an essential communications tool for many organizations and is installed on millions of devices worldwide. But security researcher Patrick Wardle revealed during a talk at Def Con that a flaw in Zoom’s installer for macOS could allow attackers to gain the highest level of access to the operating system, including system files and sensitive user documents. Wardle discovered the Zoom macOS installer has an auto-update function that runs in the background with elevated privileges, allowing an attacker to run any program through the update function and gain those privileges. Although the flaw was not patched at the time of Wardle’s presentation, Zoom fixed the issue in an update released over the weekend.

Ukraine’s cyber chief makes surprise appearance

Victor Zhora, Ukraine’s lead cybersecurity official, made an unannounced visit to Black Hat, where he spoke to attendees about the state of cyberwarfare in the country’s conflict with Russia. Zhora, who serves as deputy chairman of Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection, revealed that cyber incidents in the country have tripled since Russia’s invasion in February, adding that Ukraine had detected over 1,600 “major” cyber incidents so far in 2022, including the discovery of the Industroyer2 malware that can manipulate equipment in electrical utilities to control the flow of power.

U.S. unmasks alleged Conti ransomware operative

Also making a surprise appearance was the U.S. Department of State, which used the opportunity to announce a $10 million reward for information leading to the identification and location of five alleged members of the notorious Russia-backed Conti ransomware gang. The reward is offered as part of the State Department’s Rewards for Justice (RFJ) program, which on Thursday shared an image of a known Conti ransomware operator known as “Target,” marking the first time the U.S. government has publicly identified a Conti operative.

Virtru reveals encrypted period-tracking app prototype

The recent overturning of Roe v. Wade sparked fears that period and ovulation-tracking apps could be used to prosecute people who seek an abortion or medical care for a miscarriage and those who assist them. In response, Virtru, best known for its email encryption service for enterprises and consumers, showcased a prototype period-tracking app at Def Con that claims to give users complete control of their private information. SecureCycle, built by a team of Virtru employees in three days during a recent company hackathon, leverages open-source end-to-end encryption offered by OpenTDF and will notify the data owner if any third party attempts to access their data.

‘Basic’ security flaws create major 5G risks

5G commercial networks are starting to roll out, promising exciting new use cases like automated cars, more intelligent healthcare, and smart sensor networks. But Altaf Shaik, a researcher at the Technical University of Berlin, said these 5G networks could also present new security challenges. Shaik and his colleague Shinjo Park examined the APIs offered by 10 mobile carriers that make Internet of Things data accessible to developers and found “basic” API vulnerabilities in every one. Shaik told Wired that though these flaws are simple, they could be abused to reveal SIM card identifiers, SIM card secret keys, billing information and the identity of who purchased which SIM card.

Read more on TechCrunch:

Fintech infrastructure startup Prime Trust raises $100M to add IRAs, crypto staking

There’s been a massive proliferation of fintech services in the past few years, during which fintech companies competed to develop new products more quickly than their competitors. Nowadays, the race between fintechs has much more to do with consolidation and which companies can build a holistic, “one-stop-shop” by bringing those different products onto one platform.

Crypto custody and fintech infrastructure startup Prime Trust is positioning itself to do just that, and the company has just raised over $100 million in fresh funding to add new products to its existing suite, its CFO Rodrigo Vicuna told TechCrunch. The Las Vegas, Nevada-based company’s latest round is a Series B featuring a mix of existing and new investors including FIS, Fin Capital, Mercato Partners, Kraken Ventures, Commerce Ventures, William Blair & Company, Decasonic, University Growth Fund, Gaingels, GateCap Ventures and Seven Peaks Ventures, the company said.

Prime Trust previously raised $64 million from investors in summer of last year, five years after its founding. Since that last fundraise, Vicuna said, Prime Trust has expanded its team in numerous areas, including R&D, product and engineering, sales and compliance, bringing its total headcount to 400 today.

The firm serves around 700 customers, ranging from crypto exchanges, on-ramps, wallet apps, ATSs, RIAs, broker-dealers and banks, according to Vicuna. Prime Trust plans to use the new funds to launch a crypto-focused IRA retirement account as well as wealth management and crypto staking products, he added.

Prime Trust’s current suite of offerings can be broken down into three main stacks, Vicuna explained –“onboarding,” which comprises compliance and rails, “monetization,” which includes functions such as trading and custody, and “liquidity,” which he said includes IRAs and trading-related products.

“Most people hop into the onboarding piece first, because it’s necessary, right? You need to do AML, KYC BSA compliance, and you need to be able to provide rails in and out of your platform. I would say that was the traditional tip of the spear for the business, and now a lot of folks are saying, hey, cool, that’s table stakes, we want this other stuff,” Rodrigo said.

In addition to launching new products, the company also plans to enhance its support for tokenized products such as NFTs as well as to invest in security and scalability improvements including a new cloud architecture, he added.

“Having support for that entire spectrum of non-fungibility to fungibility is a very core piece of what we do as a core back-end provider to the overall space and being able to support the broader use cases [of blockchain] beyond just any one asset class,” Vicuna said.

The crypto infrastructure space is relatively busy, with startups of all stages such as Blockdaemon and Cryptio competing for share. In Vicuna’s view, Prime Trust stands out because its suite of products is “much broader,” a benefit to the company’s institutional clients that can pick and choose which aspects of the platform they want to leverage.

While it’s been a tough fundraising environment for crypto startups these past couple of months, Vicuna said Prime Trust’s latest round was oversubscribed. He said he sees the investor interest as reflective of the company’s status as a “picks-and-shovels” player providing the sort of underlying technology many fintech and crypto companies rely on to grow.

“We had both the benefit of planning early, but also being in the right place at the right time,” Vicuna said.

“We’re really a bet on adoption. Taking a step back, I think, has the macro market impacted the investment world? It has, yeah. Was it difficult for us to raise? Not really … People were really excited about the core back-end infrastructure of the market. They want to make that bet on adoption, and they believe despite volatility, it’ll be up and to the right.”

Elon Musk’s The Boring Company to take on hyperloop project

Elon Musk said Sunday via Twitter that his tunnel-building-for-urban-transport business The Boring Company will attempt to build a high-speed, and still theoretical, hyperloop in the coming years.

In 2013, Musk put out a white paper that outlined the idea of a transport system that could send passengers and cargo in pods through a low-pressure tube at speed in access of 700 miles per hour. He never took on the project. Instead, Musk shared basic engineering plans and encouraged others to develop the concept. While several companies and researchers have been steadily working on hyperloop for nearly a decade, there is not yet a working example of the system anywhere in the world.

Musk founded The Boring Company in December 2016 on the premise that finding fast and effective ways to dig networks of tunnels for vehicles and high-speed trains would end traffic congestion. The Boring Company has landed some contracts with cities, but nothing that uses hyperloop or high-speed transport. It’s most mature project in Las Vegas uses Tesla vehicles to shuttle people along a 1.7-mile section of underground tunnels at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Last year, the company received initial approval for a special use permit and franchise agreement that will allow the Boring Company to expand its Vegas Loop system to a 29-mile route with 51 stations that would include stops at casinos along the Las Vegas Strip, the city’s football stadium and UNLV. It would eventually reach the McCarran International Airport.

Musk’s Sunday tweet, in which he was responding to another tweet listing cities with the worst traffic in the world, comes less than a week after The Boring Company raised $675 million in a Series C funding round that pushed its valuation to $5.7 billion.

He also claimed hyperloop, like other underground tunnels, will be also immune to surface weather conditions such as hurricanes. However, there is well documented evidence of subways, which are located in underground tunnels, flooding. For instance, the New York subway flooded in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy hit the coast. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has since installed floodgates in 68 low-lying subway and Port Authority Trans-Hudson) stations in Lower Manhattan.

Adobe updates its Experience Cloud with a focus on personalization

Experience Cloud is Adobe’s umbrella brand for its digital experience solutions. These include, among other things, its data and analytics services, content management tools, a commerce platform and, with the 2020 acquisition of Workfront, a full marketing workflow management service, too. The Experience Cloud brand made its debut at the company’s 2017 Digital Marketing Summit. This event is now the Adobe Summit — you can think of it as the Experience Cloud counterpart to the Creative Cloud-centric Adobe MAX conference — and it’s no surprise that the company is announcing a slew of new products and updates to its digital experience platform at this year’s conference in Las Vegas this week.

The focus of today’s announcements is on providing new tools to help brands — and the developers that work for them — build more personalized experiences and provide deeper integrations between the different services inside the Experience Cloud, as well as some long-requested integrations with Adobe’s Creative Cloud, too.

“The companies we work with are seeing that they need to deliver more personalized experiences to their customers — and they also need to really give their employees the tools to be able to be successful in this digital economy,” Loni Stark, Adobe’s VP of Strategy and Product, told me. “A big part of our focus in these innovations around content and commerce is to provide those capabilities to personalize the shopping and commerce experiences to allow for everyone in the organization that builds customer experiences to be able to get to the richest assets and insights they need in order to do that — and to recognize that while we provide some of the best technologies out there, that one our strengths is the ability to enable developers to build whatever they imagine, to help drive greater business growth and exciting experiences that we as consumers can all benefit from.”

Maybe the highlight of today’s launch is the new Adobe App Builder for Commerce, though. With this, Adobe provides developers with tools for building cloud-native content and commerce applications. The idea here is to help developers extend the capabilities of Adobe’s commerce solutions through a set of developer tools and SDKs. With this, developers can build both new user experiences as well as microservices to build integrations with the rest of a company’s IT stack. It complements the existing App Builder for Experience Manager platform, which launched at the end of last year.

“We don’t want to have developers — when they approach Experience cloud — have so many different tools for building. They should have a unified experience across the API gateways,” Stark said. With the App Builder, she noted, developers can now more easily build more unique storefronts, for example, or extend existing e-commerce tools to also now offer in-store pick-up.

Image Credits: Adobe

As for integrations, Adobe Workfront, the company’s marketing workflow management service, is now connected with the company’s Journey Optimizer, which helps marketers manage and analyze their omnichannel campaigns. And as more employees within a business now take an active role in building these campaigns and experiences, the company also now build a deeper connection to Creative Cloud to break down these silos and give more users access to content in a company’s Creative Cloud libraries inside of the Adobe Experience Manager Assets and Assets Essentials service.

The idea here, Stark noted, is to build what the company calls ‘experience fragments.’ These are basically the atomic units that make up a company’s content libraries that can then be repurposed across different channels to serve highly personalized content to users based on their own preferences and the platform they are using.

Experience Fragments

Image Credits: Adobe

As part of this focus on personalization, Adobe also today announced new AI-driven product recommendations in Adobe Commerce that allows B2C and B2B brands to offer better recommendations based on customer behavior, product sales or popular trends. The company argues that those companies that have already trialed this new product saw 25% or greater increases in order value. Similarly, the company’s new Live Search feature, which is powered by Adobe’s Sensei AI platform, is helping consumer brand provide faster, more personalized and more relevant search results (maybe that’s something Amazon should try, too, given that its search results often trend towards the comically inept).

Daily Crunch: Overnight, Russia’s invasion puts Ukrainian tech industry on a war footing

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Thursday, February 24, 2022. No peppy intro from me today; I am a little consumed with news outside our orbit. Now, to work. – Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

  • How tech is responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: The technology world is a global industry, which means that when geopolitical conflicts arise, it impacts the world that TechCrunch covers directly. We have notes up on cyberattacks and companies in Ukraine. Obviously war is not our editorial remit, but we’d be remiss to not note how it impacts the world we cover.
  • VCs are bullish on European innovation: Continuing our look into the deep tech in Europe, venture investors remain optimistic about where the continent is heading. As we noted previously, deep tech investment in Europe had a very strong 2021.
  • A headless, cloth unicorn: Fabric, which builds APIs for e-commerce, is now a unicorn. The company’s “‘modular and headless commerce” products include some 300 APIs, it turns out. It just raised $140 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. The round goes to show that the nine-figure venture market is still getting deals done, despite some public comment from investors that things are slowing down in 2022.

Startups/VC

  • Tumblr will let you pay it to eliminate ads: Yahoo once bought Tumblr, before it was itself sold to Verizon. Yahoo was merged into AOL – which Verizon had also purchased – to form Oath. TechCrunch had been owned by AOL, so we wound up at Oath. Oath was then rebranded to Verizon Media Group. Verizon Media Group sold Tumblr to Automattic, the company behind WordPress, back in 2019. Now you can pay Tumblr, by which we mean Automattic, a monthly fee to not view ads on the microblogging service. TechCrunch, in contrast, was later sold to private equity along with the rest of Verizon Media Group, where we now reside. You cannot pay TechCrunch to remove ads. Now you are caught up!
  • Okteto raises $15M Series A: Much like yourself, I often find myself unable to whip up new Kubernetes-based development environments while writing code. Happily for both of us, Okteto is building tools to help us do just that. And it now has Series A money via Two Sigma Ventures, Haystack and others.
  • Siteline is building fintech infra for the construction market: While the consumer fintech space is chock-full of tools for what feels like any and every use case, the business world is a little bit different. Siteline, which has raised more than $18 million to date, wants to speed up the pace at which money moves in the construction industry, where today it moves with what we might call glacial patience.
  • Promise wants to help you pay your government bills: If you don’t track your checking account balance, this isn’t for you. But if you do live more paycheck to paycheck, and have ever been a little bit short in any particular month, you know the worries that your power will get turned off. Promise, a startup, aims to sit between you and the government, offering more flexible payment plans for bills. I kinda dig it.
  • Pay your rent, build credit: That’s the pitch behind Piñata, a startup that offers a service to landlords and tenants to help make the process of paying for housing while not building equity at least somewhat useful. Of course, that paying rent usually doesn’t help build one’s credit feels like an error in the market.
  • Reddit makes discovery easier: Reddit is a fun place to be if you know where to go. It has communities of all types and sorts and sizes. Finding them, however, can be tough. The social service is updating its app to make that process a bit easier.

And there was even more that went on today: Depict.ai raised $17 million for its work to provide e-commerce sites with better recommendation capabilities; a neobank in India called Niyo raised $100 million, or $4 for each of its customers; and Insight Partners raised $20 billion for its new flagship fund. Which is a sum of money I cannot really fathom.

How to strategically manage your startup advisor’s compensation

US 100 dollar bill on a fishing hook

Image Credits: Velishchuk (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images

Beware of advisors who demand a share of your equity (and precious cash) in exchange for help with tactical operations like startup recruiting and marketing.

“No founder is an expert in every domain, and as they undertake the journey of getting their companies off the ground, they need to have outside support,” says Matt Cohen, founder and managing partner at Ripple Ventures.

Even so, entrepreneurs still need accountability measures that protect their companies from “advisor sharks” and “grifters,” he writes.

In a guest post for TC+, Cohen shares advice for setting goals and creating equity packages that will create “a more accurate alignment of incentives.”

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

  • Nikola earnings aren’t awful: Troubled EV truck maker Nikola doesn’t have revenues yet, but it appears to be making real progress toward them. That and slimmer-than-expected per-share losses were the good news of the day from the company.
  • App subscription revenue grows 41% in 2021: Want to know why Apple and Google are really not in favor of not getting a fat cut of app store incomes? Because they are large and growing. “The top 100 non-game, subscription-based apps saw their consumer spend increase 41% in 2021 to $18.3 billion, up from $13 billion in 2020,” we report.
  • Self-driving Vegas ride-hailing? I am intent on putting self-driving news in this newsletter until I no longer have to drive. Today’s item is a consortium offering self-driving rides in Las Vegas (with human backup drivers). This is cool. But what would be cooler, in fact, would be ​​Motional and Via bringing the same service to Providence, Rhode Island. For no particular reason, I assure you.

TechCrunch Experts

dc experts

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images

TechCrunch is recruiting recruiters for TechCrunch Experts, an ongoing project where we ask top professionals about problems and challenges that are common in early-stage startups. If that’s you or someone you know, you can let us know here.