Trammell Venture Partners Releases 2nd Annual Bitcoin-Native Startup and VC Ecosystem Research

AUSTIN, Texas, April 11, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Trammell Venture Partners ("TVP"), an Austin-based venture capital firm, today announced the second annual results of its proprietary research on the early growth of the Bitcoin-native startup and venture capital ecosystem. In their research, TVP finds that despite the sharp crypto venture market investment decline in 2023, the Bitcoin startup sector had a breakout year at the Pre-Seed stage, with a 360% year-over-year increase in transaction count.

In the broader startup sector, 2023 exit activity reached a more than 10-year low. This activity ultimately led to a lower total number of venture deals for the second consecutive year across the startup spectrum in 2023. Crypto venture deal count specifically was down significantly in 2023: -35.3%. Yet despite this backdrop, Bitcoin-native as a category again grew in 2023; it was up 69.2% year-over-year.

TVP's research data indicate that early-stage, Bitcoin-native startups raised just under $1 billion during the 2021-2023 period. The data indicated a significant wave of venture-backed, Pre-Seed companies seeking product-market fit—typically predictive of future Seed, Series A, and subsequent rounds.

"The early indicators from the TVP research are in line with the expectations we have had for 'crypto' venture's end state: founders really want to be building on Bitcoin specifically," said Christopher Calicott, TVP's managing director and a founding partner. "With a rapidly growing array of tech enablements fueling enhanced scalability and buildability on Bitcoin, this long-held TVP hypothesis is becoming an evidence- and data-supported reality. Due to cyclicality and bitcoin's institutional embrace, its market cap dominance is even greater than at the time of our 2023 report. Despite this, allocation to Bitcoin-native venture capital remains very low, relatively speaking. We believe that delta will begin to close as more allocators start to see the compounding benefits from a rapidly expanding design space on Bitcoin thanks to these early-stage Bitcoin startups."

With an eye toward driving research and insights for the broader venture capital investment landscape, TVP launched the venture industry's first dedicated Bitcoin-native ecosystem-focused fund series in 2021. The annual release of TVP's Emerging Bitcoin-Native Venture Capital Landscape Research Brief augments the available research for Bitcoin startups. This research aims to support the institutionalization of venture investment for this emerging growth category within crypto and blockchain venture capital.

The TVP Bitcoin startup ecosystem research brief is available for download.

About Trammell Venture Partners

Trammell Venture Partners, founded in 2016, is an Austin-based early-stage venture capital firm focused on investing in highly technical companies in three core areas including Bitcoin-native technologies, security and privacy tech, and applied AI. Since 2020, TVP has focused on backing founders building on the layers of the Bitcoin protocol stack via the venture capital industry's first dedicated Bitcoin-native mandated VC fund series: The TVP Bitcoin Venture Fund series of funds. Find out more about TVP on the web, LinkedIn, and X.

Media Contact: Zach Young
Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Trammell Venture Partners