Electric Capital: The Engineers' Crypto Fund Behind the Industry's Developer Report

Electric Capital is a crypto-native venture firm from Palo Alto, California, founded in 2018 by Avichal Garg and Curtis Spencer — two successful technology entrepreneurs with stints at Facebook and Google, who had already backed companies like Airtable, Figma, Notion and Cruise and were early supporters of Bitcoin, Ethereum and Monero before launching the fund.

The firm's thesis, in its own words: since 2018 it has invested "in technologies that reduce reliance on intermediaries," because "trust in global institutions is eroding" — and AI makes the shift toward trust-minimised systems "more urgent and more possible than ever." It looks for founders who pair deep domain expertise with system-disrupting insight across AI, cryptography, fintech, healthcare, energy marketplaces, government systems, identity and reputation, and the creator economy. Investments generally run $1M–$5M in pre-seed to Series A rounds, with the firm willing to deploy $1M–$20M across equity and tokens.

The headline number is the $1 billion raised in March 2022 — two funds, a $400M vehicle for equity stakes in startups and a $600M fund for investing directly in crypto tokens. An earlier $110M vehicle closed in August 2020. Details of the original 2018 fund were never publicly stated. In September 2023, The Block reported via an SEC filing that the firm was aiming to raise $300M for Electric Capital Venture Fund III; no later confirmation has surfaced in sources read for this profile.

The firm's own press release names portfolio companies including dYdX, Bitwise, NEAR, Gitcoin, Frax, Immunefi, Iron Fish, Rabbithole, Syndicate and Tokemak. General Partner Maria Shen is also named in coverage of the firm's research arm.

That research arm is worth knowing in itself: Electric Capital's annual Developer Report is the industry standard for tracking open-source crypto developer activity — the 2024 edition analysed over 900 million code commits across 1.7 million repositories, finding that Asia accounted for 32% of global crypto developers (India at 11.7%, second only to the US at 18.7%) and that Solana had become the top ecosystem for new developers.

No accelerator, credits or founder perks were found. Instead, the firm's pitch to founders is a deeply technical partnership — validator operations, liquidity provision, governance and token-economics support through crypto cycles — from people who have shipped open-source software themselves.