Fintech infrastructure startup Prime Trust raises $ 100 million to add IRAs, crypto efforts – TechCrunch

There has been a massive proliferation of fintech services in recent years, with fintech companies competing to develop new products faster than competitors. Today, the race between fintech has much more to do with consolidation and which companies can build a comprehensive “one-stop-shop” by bringing the different products on one platform.

Startup of crypto storage and fintech infrastructure Prime Trust is positioning itself to do just that, and the company has just raised over $ 100 million in new financing to add new products to its existing suite, CFO Rodrigo Vicuna told TechCrunch. The Las Vegas, Nevada-based company’s latest round is a Series B with 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 raised $ 64 million from investors last summer, 5 years after its inception. Since the last fundraiser, Vicuna said, Prime Trust has expanded its team in a number of areas, including R&D, product and engineering, sales and compliance, bringing the total number of employees to 400 today.

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

Prime Trust’s current package of offers can be divided into three main stacks, Vicuna explained – “onboarding”, which includes compliance and rails; “Revenue generation”, which includes functions such as trading and storage; and “liquidity,” which he said includes IRAs and trade-related products.

“Most people jump into the onboarding part first, because it’s necessary, right? You must follow AML, KYC BSA, and you must be able to provide rails in and out of your platform. I would say that it was the traditional tip for the business, and now a lot of people say, hey, cool, it’s table effort; we want these other things, “Rodrigo said.

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

“Having support for the full range of non-fungibility to fungibility is a very core part of what we do as a core provider of back-end to the total space and to be able to support the broader use cases [of blockchain] beyond just any asset class, “said Vicuna.

The crypto infrastructure area is relatively busy, with the start of all stages such as Blockdaemon and Cryptio competing for sharing. In Vicuna’s view, Prime Trust stands out because its product range is “much broader”, an advantage for the company’s institutional customers who can pick and choose which aspects of the platform they want to exploit.

Although there has been a tough fundraising environment for crypto startups in the last couple of months, Vicuna said that Prime Trust’s last round was oversubscribed. He said he sees investor interest reflecting the company’s status as a “pick-and-shovel” player that offers the kind of underlying technology many fintech and crypto companies rely on to grow.

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

“We are really focusing on adoption. Taking a step back, I think, has the macro market affected the investment world? It has, yes. Was it difficult for us to raise? Not really . . . People were very excited about the core back-end infrastructure in the market. They want to focus on adoption, and they believe that despite volatility, it will be up and to the right. “