Former a16z partner launches solo fund to support early-stage fintech startups – TechCrunch

In 2015, Rex Salisbury worked as a software engineer at the now-defunct mortgage startup Sindeo, where he built out the backend for fully automated online pre-approval of mortgages.

At the time, he worked for Andy Carra, who served as the company’s CTO after co-founding SoFi.

It was Salisbury’s first foray into fintech, and high on the excitement of getting a new product live in a highly regulated industry, he admittedly got a bit of the fintech bug. At the time, the sector was nowhere near the power it is today, just “emerging as a meaningful and significant category,” Salisbury recalls.

“This meant that there were many other software engineers, product managers and entrepreneurs doing what I was – bringing new technology to use in an industry that was painfully out of date,” he said. “I wanted to meet these people.”

After a series of coffee dates and meetings, Salisbury decided that something more formal was needed. So in 2016 he started his own community, Cambrian. His goal with Cambrian was to cultivate a community focused on fintech founders and builders.

Soon after the organization was born, Salisbury began holding monthly events in San Francisco and New York, hosting an annual Product Summit and Inclusion Summit, along with quarterly job fairs. Speakers included Credit Karma’s Ken Lin, Deel’s Shuo Wang, Betterment’s Jon Stein and Plaid’s William Hockey & Zach Perret, among others. His work caught the attention of venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

“When they reached out, it became clear that it could be a very interesting opportunity—a lot of the things I had been thinking about scaling with respect to the Cambrian were similar to the work with a16z,” recalls Salisbury.

His community building had accidentally led him into the venture world as Salisbury eventually became a founding member of a16z’s fintech practice alongside general partner Anish Acharya and Angela Strange before becoming a partner in 2019.

During his two years at the firm, Salisbury went on to back the likes of now-decacorn Deel and Tally, two companies he had become familiar with through the Cambrian community. While at a16z, he started the company’s newsletter, which is still published today.

Meanwhile, Cambrian had grown to 15,000 newsletter subscribers and a founder-only Slack community of over 1,100 members.

In 2021, Salisbury came to the conclusion that layering on a fund was a natural extension of the community he had grown. So he began the process of raising capital for his own venture firm, Cambrian Ventures.

“The hospitality landscape changed dramatically during my time at a16z, and fintech was no exception,” said Salisbury. “Fintech had exploded, which is both terrifying and exciting for potential entrepreneurs. I realized that the networks I had built through Cambrian could help the next generation of entrepreneurs navigate the ever-growing ecosystem.”

He managed to attract a who’s who in the fintech group of LPs that includes founders from companies like NerdWallet, Plaid, Simple, Alloy, Modus, SentiLink, Jeeves, Betterment, Blend, Routable, Trim, LendUp, One, SoFi, Moonpay, LoanPro, Altruist, Melio and more.

And today, he’s announcing Cambrian’s first $20 million fund “to support the next generation of fintech entrepreneurs” at the angel, pre-seed and seed levels with checks up to $500,000.

“Our mission is to give our founders access to the best networks in fintech,” said Salisbury. “The fund itself reflects a community ethos with some of the best fintech entrepreneurs who are both investors in the fund and resources for the companies we support.”

As a community, Cambrian helped people connect through its co-founder matching and hiring through its talent and job board. Now it will also be able to provide investment capital.

As a small fund that writes non-lead checks, Cambrian is exclusively focused on the earliest stage of company formation. Salisbury wants to be “the very first check” to a startup, and intends to be hands-on and collaborative as an investor, bringing in other founders (especially from the fund’s investor base), seed funds and multi-stage funds to co-invest or lead future rounds .

“The beauty of being a solo venture capitalist is that I can be very flexible, like working with founders who are starting up and who just want to raise a very small angel round and say ‘we don’t really want any major institutions involved because we want flexibility to think and rotate,” Salisbury told TechCrunch.

Image credit: Rex Salisbury, founder of Cambrian Ventures

With Salisbury as the solo GP, Cambrian plans to back 30 companies, with investments of up to $500,000. So far, the firm has made five investments in recent months, including Keep Financiallhis last seed round. Salisbury expects the capital will be fully deployed over 24 months.

In general, he plans to support US-based companies with US-oriented go-to markets.

“My key objective is ‘how do I identify and support the next generation of fintech entrepreneurs?’ Salisbury said. “And at the earliest stage, you’re really investing in people.”

There were no hard feelings from his former colleagues at a16z.

“Rex’s influence, reach and ability to identify the next great entrepreneurs in fintech is impressive and made him a valuable asset at a16z,” said Acharya. “We are excited to see how he and Cambrian will continue to support the fintech ecosystem with the launch of this fund.”

Carra, a SoFi co-founder with whom Salisbury worked early in his career, remembers first meeting him after the engineer had completed a coding boot camp.

Although he was still early in his career, Carra describes Salisbury as being the person “who asked the sharp ‘tough’ questions in all-hands meetings,” to the point where other members of the leadership team believed Carra was feeding him questions.

“The case was simply that Rex is smart, understands both economics and technology, has a sharp analytical mind and is willing to ask the tough questions in good faith,” he said. “There was an ongoing conversation among those of us who worked with him that we were looking forward to investing in his startup—we assumed he would be a founder next.”

It turns out Salisbury’s “startup” was Cambrian, and Carra is now an LP in the new fund.

“I really enjoy the community that he’s built and refer aspiring founders to it when I can,” he told TechCrunch via email. “I love that he has taken the time to understand the space as a multi-role operator, and I like Cambrian’s model and risk profile.”

Betterment founder Jon Stein described Salisbury as a “great investor.”

“I invested with him because he is among the best network and community builders I have ever seen,” he said via email.

Salisbury isn’t the only casual VC in the fintech space. Earlier this year, Nik Milanovic – who had also started with a newsletter and meetings – launched his own venture fund to support early-stage startups.

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