Bunker Mentality

Here’s one you don’t see everyday.

The AP is reporting that on Friday German investigators shut down a data center installed in a former NATO bunker. The center hosted dark web-ish sites that dealt in drugs and other illegal activities.

Apparently a 59-year-old Dutchman acquired the former military bunker in 2013 and turned it into a heavily secured data processing center “in order to make it available to clients….exclusively for illegal purposes.”

Those platforms included “Cannabis Road” (self-explanatory) and the “Wall Street Market “ (where one could procure hacking and financial theft tools), among others. No word yet on whether the bunker came with any launch codes.

Some venture capital funding rounds of note on this celebrated 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China: Rapyd, a London-based “fintech-as-a-service” startup has raised a total of $160M. But there’s loads of competition in the digital payment space (Adyen, PayPal, Stripe, WorldPay, among others).

Another fintech startup, LA-based “Dave,” which launched with money management tools to save consumers from overdraft fees, raised $50M from Norwest, bringing its valuation to $1B. Dave has 4M users and apparently a waiting list of 800K, but apparently no last name.