The venture capital firm based in Austin, Texas, was founded in 2016 and specializes in early-stage Bitcoin startup investing.
TVP Reveals 767% Explosion in Early-Stage Bitcoin Startup Funding
On Thursday, Austin’s Trammell Venture Partners (TVP), an early-stage Bitcoin venture capital firm, published its third annual report on the cryptocurrency’s emerging venture capital landscape, revealing a 767% jump in “Bitcoin-native” pre-seed transactions.
The firm defines “Bitcoin-native” as a startup “founded with the first principle that bitcoin is the global monetary asset of the future and Internet-native digital cash.” That definition includes the bulk of TVP’s portfolio companies, such as Voltage, a startup that specializes in Lightning Network infrastructure or Fedi, a company that launched a Bitcoin superapp that encompasses chat, money, and many other social features.
TVP’s research shows that by the end of 2024, the number of pre-seed venture transactions for such Bitcoin-native startups had ballooned by 767% since 2021 and during that same timeframe, TVP says Bitcoin startups raised roughly $1.2 billion.
“Many entrepreneurs across crypto are revisiting the Bitcoin stack as the long-term place to build their companies,” said Christopher Calicott, managing director at TVP. “It makes perfect sense. The objectively most secure, reliable, and decentralized blockchain is the obvious platform of choice,” he added.
Bitcoin.com reached out to TVP to confirm how the 767% increase was arrived at and Calicott said the raw data was proprietary. “We’ve not been putting the raw data from our data set out, other than in summary statistics,” he explained.
The report reveals other insightful trends; for example, funding in 2024 dipped 22.1% to $234 million, the lowest total capital raised for the 2021-2024 timeframe. However, 2024 also saw the total number of funded startups and pre-seed transactions jump by 27.5% and 50%, respectively. Series A transaction count saw the largest jump, increasing by 60% in 2024.
But perhaps the most interesting chart is one that shows how small the Bitcoin-native venture capital investment landscape is compared to that of the non- BTC crypto ecosystem. Despite Bitcoin’s 63% dominance of the total cryptocurrency market capitalization, TVP’s data shows that the leading digital asset only garners a paltry 2.34% of all crypto venture dollars invested. Is the glass only 2.34% full or 97.66% empty? Calicott suggests it’s the former.
“As this wave of early-stage companies finds traction, increasing amounts of crypto value will accrue to the Bitcoin stack, a core thesis for TVP,” Calicott explained.