Rex Salisbury, the solo GP behind Cambrian Ventures, fondly remembers the time he fell in love with fintech.
The 12 months was 2015, he had lately left his job as an funding banker to strive his hand on engineering at a mortgage startup in San Francisco. “That’s whenever you had corporations like Stripe, Plaid, Credit score Karma, Wealthfront beginning to scale,” he instructed TechCrunch. “Lending Membership had simply carried out their IPO, and was buying and selling rather well.”
Buyers’ pleasure for fintech grew exponentially within the following years, reaching a fever pitch in 2021. Issues calmed down noticeably a 12 months later, nevertheless, as rates of interest rose.
Right now, many assume fintech has misplaced its luster, however Salisbury’s enthusiasm for the class stays as sturdy because it did in 2015. He feels the favored opinion that the majority alternatives in fintech have been exhausted couldn’t be farther from the reality. “In case you’re a specialist and the place to look, you’ll understand that just one% of worldwide monetary providers revenues has been captured by fintech,” he mentioned.
Certainly, Salisbury has been busy investing in pre-seed and seed-stage startups from Cambrian’s inaugural $20 million fund. Of the 33 corporations he has funded, Salisbury claims about half have already secured Sequence A funding, significantly larger than the 15.4% seed-to-Sequence A commencement price tracked by Carta.
These corporations embrace Easy Closures, which helps startups shut store, and Preserve, a Canadian bank card and funds platform.
Salisbury credit the primary fund’s efficiency together with his capacity to search out sturdy founders “who’re superb at executing in opposition to the imaginative and prescient they lay out.”
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That early success has now helped Salisbury safe a second fund, which, like the primary one, is launching with $20 million in dedicated capital.
The haul is a outstanding feat for a small enterprise fund like Cambrian: A report by PitchBook confirmed that fundraising by rising enterprise managers (outlined as companies nonetheless working their first three funds) hit a decade low within the first half of 2025.
Salisbury isn’t simply one other fintech investor, nevertheless. Earlier than launching Cambrian Ventures, he was the founding member of Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z) fintech apply. And through his a number of years on the distinguished agency, he invested in a startup known as Deel, which might go on to turn into a large within the payroll and human useful resource instruments house.
Previous to becoming a member of a16z, Salisbury based a fintech group that hosted month-to-month meetups for founders, builders, and sector fanatics. He additionally launched a publication that soared to about 20,000 subscribers, and runs a Slack group that now boasts over 1,800 founders.
Due to his well-regarded community, Salisbury attracted founders from high fintech corporations like NerdWallet, Plaid, Betterment, and Melio as LPs for his first fund. These people returned to put money into his second fund, which additionally noticed the addition of a number of institutional backers, together with a financial institution and a life insurance coverage agency.
Salisbury says his technique stays unchanged for Cambrian’s second fund, explaining that he’s nonetheless targeted on “discovering nice founders who’ve new concepts for distinctive merchandise.”
In fact, what’s completely different now could be that startups can leverage all of the developments in AI. “The most important factor AI permits you to do is construct multi-product corporations from day one,” he mentioned.
“AI makes it simpler to put in writing extra code that does extra issues,” he defined, pointing to his funding in Each. “They do banking, accounting, finance, company tax, treasury, HR, HSA, FSA, and some different issues, multi function.”
