Avichal Garg is a San Francisco-based entrepreneur and investor best known as co-founder and general partner of Electric Capital, a crypto-focused venture firm he launched in 2018 alongside Curtis Spencer. Before turning to investing, Garg built products at scale: he served as a director of product management at Facebook and previously co-founded two startups – App.io (acquired) and Flin. That operating background shapes his investing philosophy, which centers on backing developer infrastructure and open-source crypto ecosystems at the earliest stages.
Electric Capital occupies a distinctive analytical niche in crypto venture. Since 2019 the firm has published its annual Electric Capital Developer Report, tracking open-source commits across hundreds of blockchain ecosystems. The report has become a widely cited benchmark for ecosystem health, covering metrics like monthly active developers per chain. This research-first approach gives the firm an edge in spotting under-the-radar developer communities before liquidity and retail attention arrive. The fund focuses on early-stage deals – seed and Series A – and is known for writing initial checks into protocols rather than waiting for proven traction.
Notable investments
- Compound – DeFi lending protocol, one of Electric Capital's early and high-profile positions
- dYdX – decentralised perpetuals exchange
- MakerDAO – stablecoin and governance protocol
- Anchorage Digital – federally chartered crypto bank in the United States
- Bitwise Asset Management – crypto index and ETP manager
Public information about the full portfolio breadth is limited, and deal sizes are not routinely disclosed. The five portfolio companies tracked in CoinMagnetic's database represent a subset of Electric Capital's total holdings.
Team
Garg and Curtis Spencer are the two founding and managing partners of Electric Capital. Spencer shares a similar product and engineering background. The firm operates with a lean investment team relative to traditional multi-billion-dollar crypto funds, a deliberate choice to stay focused on conviction-based early-stage deals. Public information about other investment staff beyond the two partners is limited.
Recent activity
Electric Capital has remained active through the 2022–2023 bear market and the subsequent recovery. The firm continued publishing its developer reports through that period, noting a contraction in total crypto developers during the downturn followed by gradual recovery heading into 2024–2025. Garg has been vocal on X (formerly Twitter) about Layer 2 scaling, Bitcoin DeFi, and the long-term importance of developer retention as a leading indicator for ecosystem value. The firm has not publicly announced a new flagship fund close as of mid-2025, though deal activity has continued across infrastructure and DeFi verticals.
Garg's profile in crypto venture is built more on analytical credibility than deal volume. The Developer Report gives Electric Capital an annual moment of broad industry attention that few firms its size can match. For projects building developer tools, infrastructure, or open-source protocols, Electric Capital remains one of the more aligned early backers in the space – given Garg's own operating history writing and shipping software at scale.