How Avichal Garg Built Electric Capital Into an Engineering-Led Crypto Investor

A $30.4 million filing rarely tells you much about how a firm actually operates day to day. This one is worth reading alongside the story of a founder who spent years shipping code at two of the largest technology companies in the world before he ever wrote a check as an investor.

ECP O13, LLC, the vehicle behind today's filing, ties back to Electric Capital, the digital-assets investment firm Avichal Garg co-founded in 2018. Before Electric Capital, Garg worked on Search and Ads at Google, then joined Facebook as Director of Product Management for its Local product group, leading a team of roughly 400 engineers responsible for billions in revenue. He also co-founded a company called Spool, which Facebook acquired in 2012. That engineering and product background is not incidental to how Electric Capital is run: the firm is staffed by former founders and senior general partners who are also engineers from Google and Facebook rather than career financiers, and its partners continue writing and reviewing code alongside making investment decisions.

Structuring capital through a named vehicle like ECP O13 rather than exclusively out of a single commingled fund is a pattern several web3 specialists have adopted as digital-asset markets have matured, letting a firm size individual opportunities on their own terms rather than forcing every deal through one fund's return profile and reserve strategy.

What "Founder-to-Founder" Investing Actually Means Here

Garg has described his approach explicitly as founder-to-founder rather than finance-led, a distinction that shows up in Electric Capital's portfolio and public output alike. Before founding the firm, Garg made close to two dozen angel investments, including Airtable, Boom Supersonic, Color Genomics, Cruise, Deel, Figma, Newfront Insurance, Notion, Nova Credit and Pulley, a list that spans well beyond crypto into SaaS and vertical software, evidence that his own investing instincts were shaped by product and engineering judgment before Electric Capital narrowed its public focus to digital assets. Electric Capital has also built a reputation independent of any single portfolio company through its annual Developer Report, a widely cited dataset tracking active developer counts across blockchain ecosystems that has become a reference point other investors and founders use to gauge which crypto networks are actually being built on versus simply traded.

Why an Engineering-Led Firm Evaluates Deals Differently

A crypto or web3 founder pitching a typical generalist fund is often evaluated primarily on token economics, market narrative and go-to-market traction. A firm staffed by engineers who have built and shipped production systems at Google-and-Facebook scale is more likely to press on technical architecture, protocol design decisions and whether the underlying system can actually handle the load a successful launch would bring, a different and in some ways harder diligence bar than a purely narrative-driven pitch has to clear.

That same lens shows up in how Electric Capital talks publicly about the sector. Garg has been outspoken about distinguishing infrastructure with genuine developer activity from projects sustained mainly by speculative trading volume, a distinction the firm's own Developer Report is explicitly built to make visible with data rather than leaving it to anecdote or market narrative. For a founder, that public track record of separating real technical traction from hype is a useful signal of what the firm's partners will actually be testing for in a first meeting.

What This Means for Founders

For a founder building in crypto, web3 infrastructure or developer tooling, Electric Capital's engineering-first culture means a pitch heavy on technical substance is likely to land better here than one built primarily around market narrative or token mechanics alone. A founder preparing to raise from a firm like this should expect technical due diligence that goes deeper than a typical generalist crypto fund, and should be ready to have partners who can genuinely evaluate architecture decisions rather than defer entirely to outside technical advisors. Electric Capital's own Developer Report is also a useful diagnostic tool independent of any pitch: a founder can check where their own ecosystem's developer activity ranks before walking into a conversation with a firm that treats that exact metric as a core part of its own investment thesis.

Browse web3 investors with an active mandate on AngelLinx, look at how a technical due diligence process typically runs before a term sheet arrives, or explore active capital on AngelLinx @ angellinx.ai/register.

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