reforge q1 2026 overview
>5,054 companies/projects across private markets (fintech, ai, robotics, frontier tech) sourced through Ava
>3,051 proceeded to deeper diligence and Ava's research stack produced an in-depth memo
>202 teams received an email or DM from us; that's a 6% conversion from the prior diligence phase
>20 of those were discussed at two or more ICs
>2 investments made
tldr: Top of funnel is healthy by quantity - more teams than ever building but quality is just not there; there's a lot of noise accompanying very little signal. Makes sense given the vibe coding craze and software commoditizing. So just because we decided not to participate in superfluous twitter discourse around fundraising in crypto or have our name put on a spreadsheet does not mean we are not extremely active. To us, the investable subset of opportunities is just extremely small.
note 1: This does not include our inbound stats; that said, we execute a outbound-heavy strategy
note 2: 3,051 -> 202 includes filtering out projects that may be too out-of-scope for us (robotics, frontier tech, etc.) but if there are signals that indicate a co could be generational, we'll still include in our pipeline
reminder: Reforge is not just a "crypto vc". We are a venture capital and technology firm investing across the financial system value chain with a very broad mandate
Some insights:
Consensus is rising around core primitives but very few teams are actually solving the hard problems. the most crowded sectors are what you'd imagine and we’ve found difficult to build conviction in their long term sustainability:
- x402/agentic payments/agent commerce rails
- prediction markets: terminals, aggregators, wrappers
- stablecoins/payments/neobanks
- ai trading agents/execution wrappers
Where we felt differentiation specifically in finance/crypto:
- market-structure, risk-transfer, liquidity, and margin primitives
- credit, settlement, and post-trade infrastructure
- software-native markets with novel agent-workflow infrastructure (no wrappers!)
With Ava, we have more data than ever on early-stage private markets across multiple sectors, predominately ai and finance. If you have any questions or are curious to learn more about what we’re seeing, just let us know