Rex Salisbury, the solo GP behind Cambrian Ventures, fondly recalls the time he fell in love with fintech.
The year was 2015, he had recently left his job as an investment banker to try his hand on engineering at a mortgage startup in San Francisco. “That’s when you had companies like Stripe, Plaid, Credit Karma, Wealthfront starting to scale,” he told TechCrunch. “Lending Club had just done their IPO, and was trading really well.”
Investors’ excitement for fintech grew exponentially in the following years, reaching a fever pitch in 2021. Things calmed down noticeably a year later, however, as interest rates rose.
Today, many think fintech has lost its luster, but Salisbury’s enthusiasm for the category remains as strong as it did in 2015. He feels the popular opinion that most opportunities in fintech have been exhausted could not be further from the truth. “If you’re a specialist and you know where to look, you’ll realize that only 1% of global financial services revenues has been captured by fintech,” he said.
Indeed, Salisbury has been busy investing in pre-seed and seed-stage startups from Cambrian’s inaugural $20 million fund. Of the 33 companies he has funded, Salisbury claims about half have already secured Series A funding, considerably higher than the 15.4% seed-to-Series A graduation rate tracked by Carta.
These companies include Simple Closures, which helps startups close shop, and Keep, a Canadian credit card and payments platform.
Salisbury credits the first fund’s performance with his ability to find strong founders “who are very good at executing against the vision they lay out.”
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That early success has now helped Salisbury secure a second fund, which, like the first one, is launching with $20 million in committed capital.
The haul is a remarkable feat for a small venture fund like Cambrian: A report by PitchBook showed that fundraising by emerging venture managers (defined as firms still running their first three funds) hit a decade low in the first half of 2025.
Salisbury isn’t just another fintech investor, however. Before launching Cambrian Ventures, he was the founding member of Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z) fintech practice. And during his several years at the prominent firm, he invested in a startup called Deel, which would go on to become a giant in the payroll and human resource tools space.
Prior to joining a16z, Salisbury founded a fintech community that hosted monthly meetups for founders, builders, and sector enthusiasts. He also launched a newsletter that soared to about 20,000 subscribers, and runs a Slack group that now boasts over 1,800 founders.
Thanks to his well-regarded network, Salisbury attracted founders from top fintech companies like NerdWallet, Plaid, Betterment, and Melio as LPs for his first fund. These individuals returned to invest in his second fund, which also saw the addition of several institutional backers, including a bank and a life insurance firm.
Salisbury says his strategy remains unchanged for Cambrian’s second fund, explaining that he is still focused on “finding great founders who have new ideas for unique products.”
Of course, what’s different now is that startups can leverage all the advancements in AI. “The biggest thing AI lets you do is build multi-product companies from day one,” he said.
“AI makes it easier to write more code that does more things,” he explained, pointing to his investment in Every. “They do banking, accounting, finance, corporation tax, treasury, HR, HSA, FSA, and a few other things, all in one.”
