Electric Capital

Electric Capital is a San Francisco-based venture capital firm founded in 2018 to back builders at the frontier of cryptography, decentralized infrastructure, and distributed systems. What sets it apart from conventional crypto funds is a deliberate philosophy: every investor on the team writes code, and the firm deploys this technical depth not just in due diligence but in ongoing support for founders after the check is signed.

Investment Focus

Electric Capital invests at the preseed through Series A stages, writing initial checks of $1 million to $15 million or more. The firm concentrates on technology that reduces reliance on intermediaries — blockchain infrastructure, AI, fintech, identity and reputation systems, healthcare data, energy marketplaces, and the creator economy. Its thesis holds that the long-term winners in any of these categories will be defined by the quality and density of the developer ecosystems they build.

In March 2022, Electric Capital closed $1 billion across two parallel vehicles: a $400 million equity fund for startup investments and a $600 million token fund for direct protocol investments. Backers were drawn largely from university endowments, large nonprofits, and foundations. This dual-track structure allows the firm to capture both the equity upside of portfolio companies and the token upside of the protocols they back — a design that reflects how value actually accrues in crypto markets.

As of mid-2026, Electric Capital has backed 103 companies. Its portfolio has produced eight unicorns, three IPOs, and eleven acquisitions, with a cumulative market capitalization exceeding $50 billion. Notable investments include Kraken, Mysten Labs (the team behind Sui), Consensys, NEAR Protocol, Magic Eden, and Squads — the Solana-native multi-signature wallet and program infrastructure platform.

The Developer Report

Electric Capital's most recognized contribution to the broader crypto ecosystem is its annual Developer Report, published at developerreport.com and freely available to the public. The report emerged from a conviction that developer activity is the most reliable leading indicator of which blockchains will matter long-term, and that this signal had never been systematically measured.

Since its first edition in 2018, the report has grown into the most comprehensive open-source analysis of crypto developer activity in existence. The 2024 edition analyzed more than 902 million code commits across 1.7 million repositories — a dataset that lets Electric Capital track not just who is building, but where they are building, how long they stay, and whether they branch across multiple chains.

The methodology distinguishes between new developers, full-time developers (those committing code in ten or more months per year), and multi-chain developers who contribute across more than one ecosystem. This granularity separates genuine ecosystem momentum from speculative noise.

Key findings from the 2024 report:

• Solana ranked first for new developer onboarding, attracting 7,625 new developers — over 1,000 more than Ethereum. For the first time since 2016, Solana surpassed Ethereum in monthly new developer onboarding, a milestone reached in July 2024, driven by the network's high-performance architecture and low transaction costs.
• Total monthly active developers across crypto reached 23,613 in November 2024, a decline of just 7% from 2023. Departures were concentrated among developers with less than one year of experience.
• Experienced developers — those with more than two years of tenure — grew 27% year-over-year and were responsible for 70% of all code committed, a sign of the ecosystem's maturation beyond speculative cycles.
• Asia surpassed North America as the leading continent for crypto development, with India generating 17% of global new developer share — the largest of any single country.
• EigenLayer posted the fastest developer growth of any ecosystem at 167% year-over-year, fueled by protocols building Actively Validated Services atop Ethereum's restaking infrastructure.
• One in three developers now works across multiple blockchains, up from less than 10% in 2015, with Ethereum, Solana, and Base leading multi-chain adoption.

In 2025, Electric Capital extended its research beyond developer activity. The firm published an analysis of stablecoin transactions from July to September 2025 across the five largest stablecoin networks — Ethereum, Base, Binance Smart Chain, Tron, and Solana — representing $13.59 trillion in aggregate transaction volume over that period. All underlying developer data is open-sourced through opendevdata.org.

Team

Electric Capital was co-founded by Avichal Garg and Curtis Spencer, both serving as General Partners. The broader GP team includes Ken Deeter, Maria Shen, and Ren CF — who drove the firm's investments in Solana, Monad, and other high-performance infrastructure projects. Thuan Le serves as Partner and Head of Founder Platform. The team collectively founded eight companies (six acquired) and operated business units generating over one billion dollars in revenue.

Beyond capital, Electric Capital provides direct hands-on support to portfolio founders on product-market fit, technical architecture, team building, liquidity management, and regulatory navigation — a meaningful differentiator given that its investors hold active engineering roles.

Significance for Solana

Electric Capital occupies a distinctive position in the Solana ecosystem: it functions simultaneously as an investor in Solana-native companies (including Squads and Magic Eden) and as the primary neutral researcher tracking the network's developer health. The annual Developer Report provides the most widely cited data on how Solana's developer community compares to Ethereum, Base, and other chains. The 2024 finding that Solana led all ecosystems in new developer onboarding was a significant benchmark for the network's standing as a development platform — and a data point that originated entirely from Electric Capital's own research infrastructure.