Rex Salisbury, the solo gp back Cambrian VenturesHe remembers with joy the time he fell in love with Fintech.
The year was in 2015. He recently abandoned his job as an investment banker to try his hand in engineering at a mortgage start in San Francisco. “Then you had companies like Stripe, Plaid, Credit Karma, Wealthfront starting to scale,” he told TechCrunch. “The Lending Club had just made their iPO and they were negotiating very well.”
Investors’ enthusiasm for Fintech increased exponentially in the coming years, reaching a fever in 2021. Things destroyed significantly a year later, however, as interest rates rose.
Today, many believe that Fintech has lost its shine, but Salisbury’s enthusiasm for the category remains as strong as 2015. He thinks that the popular view that most opportunities in Fintech have exhausted could not be addressed more than the truth. “If you are an expert and you know where to look, you will realize that only 1% of the revenue from global financial services have been arrested by Fintech,” he said.
Indeed, Salisbury was busy investing in newly established pre-seed and seed companies from the Cambrian 20 million dollar fund. Of the 33 companies he has funded, Salisbury claims that about half have already secured the funding of Series A, significantly higher than the graduation rate of 15.4% to seeds to the series Watched Carta.
These companies include simple closures, which help newly established businesses to close the store and maintain a Canadian credit card and payment platform.
Salisbury credits the performance of the first fund with his ability to find powerful founders “who are very good at executing against the vision they are”.
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This early success has now helped Salisbury secure a second fund, which starts with $ 20 million in committed capital.
The withdrawal is a remarkable achievement for a small business capital fund such as Cambrian: A Reference by Votrophic They showed that raising funds by emerging business managers (designated as businesses still running their first three capital) hit a decade low in the first half of 2025.
However, Salisbury is not just another Fintech investor. Before the Cambrian Ventures began, he was the founding member of Andreessen Horowitz’s (A16Z) Practice. And during his many years in the prominent business, he invested in a start -up called Deel, which would continue to become a giant in the field of wages and human resources.
Before entering the A16Z, Salisbury founded a FinTech community that hosted monthly meetings for founders, manufacturers and enthusiastic sector. It also launched an newsletter that went up to about 20,000 subscribers and manages a relaxed team that now has over 1,800 founders.
Thanks to his well -apparent network, Salisbury attracted founders from leading Fintech companies such as Nerdwallet, Plaid, Betterment and Melio as LPS for his first fund. These people returned to invest in his second fund, which also saw the addition of many institutional supporters, including a bank and a life insurance company.
Salisbury says his strategy remains unchanged for Cambrian’s second fund, explaining that he still focuses on “finding great founders who have new ideas for unique products.”
Of course, what is different is that newly formed businesses can make use of all developments in AI. “The biggest thing you allow to do is to create multi -product companies from day one,” he said.
“AI facilitates the pension of more code that does more things,” he explained, showing his investment in each. “They make banking, accounting, funding, corporate tax, treasury, HR, HSA, FSA and some other things, all in one.”
