Theory Ventures

Three years ago we started Theory on the thesis that AI would reshape how software gets built, sold, and run. And it did -- but so much faster than anyone expected. Our conversation has shifted from model companies to larger opportunities: the inference layer to power it all, the AI advertising services to subsidize, the agents that will rewrite operations, cybersecurity to combat the growing attack surface, and even better crypto experiences. The next three years will make these look slow. The most ambitious builders we'll meet are just getting started, & we can’t wait to see what they do. tomtunguz.com/three-years-in/

Three years ago, we launched Theory Ventures with a simple premise : AI would reshape how software is built, sold, deployed, & operated. Within that world, we would build a concentrated, thesis-driven firm. The market moved faster than even the most bullish expectations after the ChatGPT moment. Frontier models leapt from delicate demos to production systems. Open source models have become substitutes for enterprise workloads. Inference emerged as the dominant market in AI. Underpinning all of this, AI compresses time. New models are released every 41 days. Companies reach $100m in revenue in record time. We all achieve more faster. In celebration of our anniversary, we wanted to trace that mechanism through the market shifts of the last three years. The first casualty of compressed time is the old language of venture capital. Seed, Series A, Series B categories still exist, but they describe the financial product companies seek rather than rather than company maturity. Venture firms have left the idea of offering a standard financial product to bespoke offerings : seeds range from $1m to $500m in size. Can we really call it all the same thing, anymore? Three years ago, a seed company was often a small team with a product concept & early signs of product-market fit. Today, some seed rounds are larger than IPOs, fueled by great ambition, a supportive VC ecosystem, & the promise of generational scale businesses to be built. Part of this is inflation in private markets. But more of it is time compression : the best companies mature much earlier than software companies did in prior generations. We’ve learned as an ecosystem how to build software companies & AI accelerates product development. Compressed time also redraws the map of where great opportunity lies. When we first launched Theory, most AI conversations centered on models. Remember the debate of whether model companies would be the airlines of the era? Today, inference is becoming the dominant market. The market is segmenting because the workloads & buyer preferences have evolved - very few companies can afford state-of-the-art AI for everyone - & each specialized constraint creates a new infrastructure category. Companies like @sailresearchco are building the systems that operationalize intelligence : serving it cheaply, routing it intelligently, & specializing it around use cases like video, batch, local, agentic, & real-time workloads. Databases followed this path a decade ago. They fragmented into OLTP, OLAP, vector databases, & streaming systems. Those markets have evolved with AI, a pattern we’ve backed through @motherduck & @lancedb , with @omni in the AI analytics layer above them. Inference infrastructure is now specializing the same way. The expense of inference reinvigorates a sedate market that has been controlled by behemoths for a decade : advertising. Every major interface shift, TV, web, mobile, streaming, found its answer to monetizing a massive audience in ads, & AI is no different. AI advertising is emerging as the subsidy for inference costs, letting applications grow usage & revenue together rather than against each other. We wrote about this dynamic when we led @koahlabs ' Series A : native ad formats inside AI conversations are producing click-through rates 4-5x the display baseline, & an agentic app builder can provide inference offset by ads. The same compression closed the gap between closed & open models, cloud models & local models. The conventional narrative holds that frontier closed-source models lead & open source follows. We’ve reached the iPhone 15 moment of AI. Many models are good enough for most work. Running a model locally reduces cost, improves latency, increases control, & minimizes data governance concerns. Enterprises are adopting local & open-source models for sensitive workloads, & frontier capabilities compress toward consumer hardware within a few years. What once required a hyperscaler cluster runs on a laptop just a few quarters later, a shift @ollama brings to millions of developers. The promise of AI is that software will ultimately be more secure : machines that read every line of code, patch faster than attackers move, & never tire. In the meantime, the attack surface is exploding. MCP servers, skills, plug-ins, & coding agents each introduce new entry points, & enterprises are deploying them faster than security teams can review them. Attackers are massively parallel & shrinking necessary response times from months to minutes. Defenses must respond. It’s why we backed @DropzoneAI , whose AI analysts investigate the alert flood no human SOC can keep up with, @Maze_Security , which applies agents to cloud vulnerability triage, & @artemis , securing the new agentic surface itself. The same agentic wave is rewriting operations. ERP & back-office systems have resisted change for decades because the work is unglamorous, the data is messy, & the switching costs are enormous. One CFO we interviewed, when asked about a startup said, “that company has only been around 15 years; they are too immature.” Agents invert that math. Systems that read documents, reconcile records, & execute workflows can attack operations from the inside rather than demanding a rip-&-replace. It’s the thesis behind Doss, rebuilding ERP for teams that move at modern speed, & Backops, applying agents to the back-office work no one wants to do by hand. AI has impacted crypto, another market fueled by data. Prediction markets, stablecoins, micropayments all have an AI infusion to them. Today, crypto companies need to generate revenue & use AI to provide better experiences, which led to our investment @AlliumLabs , the data layer underneath that institutional wave. Recognizing shifts early requires fingers on keyboards, wrestling AI agents into compliance rather than observing it. We built Theory as a technical organization, experimenting with AI across research, sourcing, diligence, portfolio support, & internal operations. Working inside these systems sharpens our understanding of where the stack is breaking & where new workflows are emerging, while deepening our empathy for founders deploying real AI systems inside enterprises. It’s harder than social media says. AI also changes the economics of an investment firm. Over the last decade, venture firms scaled by adding people. AI-native companies are demonstrating that much smaller teams can operate at 10x+ the leverage of prior software generations, & the same dynamic applies to us : since launch, we’ve analyzed 2x the investment opportunities with a team of just 3 investors working alongside a nine-person intelligence organization. None of this works without the team behind it. Theory started three years ago as a handful of people & a thesis. Today we are thirteen strong. We believe this is the structure of a modern venture capital firm : engineers & researchers who build the systems we use every day : agents that map markets, pipelines that surface companies months before they raise, & research infrastructure that lets a small team cover the ground of a firm several times our size. Everyone at @Theoryvc works with the technology we invest in, & that shared fluency shapes every decision we make. The firm we’ve built over three years is itself a product of the thesis : a small team, deeply technical, operating with the leverage AI makes possible. But the real story of these three years is the founders. They compressed decades of company-building into quarters & shipped products that rewrote what enterprises expect from software. The next three years will make these look slow. The most ambitious builders we meet are just getting started, & we can’t wait to see what they do.

The best AI advantage isn’t a better model, it's owning the one you run. And @ollama is how you do it. 8.9M developers build on it (growing nearly another million each week), with 67K integrations and adoption in 85% of Fortune 500.  Theory is proud to back founders @jmorgan and @mchiang0610 in Ollama’s $65M Series B: youtube.com/watch?v=0iJAWh…

Your AI agent is about to capsize your compute budget, but @sailresearchco saw it coming ⛵

Last call to join this Thursday’s office hours at 9am PT / 12pm ET! Join @ttunguz and Sunil Agrawal, CISO at @glean and former security leader at Bolt, Nutanix, Netflix, Adobe, and more. Frontier models are in attackers’ hands. We’ll be unpacking how the playbook changes as we shift from human adversaries to ones that operate at machine-speed. Register: gatsby.events/theory-venture…

Security always comes second, and attackers know it. Our Head of AI @BEBischof sits down with @HarryWetherald, co-founder and CEO of @Maze_Security, for an In-Practice episode on the AI-driven arms race with attackers and what else teams can do since guardrails can't separate good hacking from bad. Watch: youtube.com/watch?v=MXnLdZ…

And that's a wrap on World's Fair in SF 🎉 Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth to say hi and dive into LanceDB internals. Some of the best conversations happen at a conference booth and this year was no exception. It was great meeting everyone who came out to SPIN SF with @theoryvc & @ollama and to our USA World Cup watch party with @ExaAILabs, @ExtendHQ, & @fastinoAI last week. Both were packed, both were a good time, and we'd absolutely do them again. See you at the next one 👋

Trillion is the new billion. But what does it take to manage such large & multimodal datasets for AI? @lancedb Co-founder and CTO Lei Xu unpacks new data infrastructure challenges, from storing large blobs, to trillion-size tables, and dealing with distributed pipelines. Watch his full talk from @AICouncilConf: youtube.com/watch?is=myQOJ…

Agentic payments are already underway, but who owns the trusted financial data layer behind them? @alliumlabs is building this future, and if you want to be a part of it, they're hiring:

@ethanyish @lchylch You should follow @Theoryvc to hear about all our events. 😅

@Theoryvc omg you guys had a ping pong tournament and didn’t invite @lchylch and i

Never miss a Theory side event.

Our AI Engineer, Melanie, was happy to deliver a Codex reset today at @aiDotEngineer World's Fair. Thanks to @dkundel and @thsottiaux and ofc @OpenAIDevs

🖲️ We love our community! To celebrate getting together with many of you we brought @thsottiaux's reset button to AIE World's Fair. Congrats Melanie for pushing the button 🎉 All Codex Go/Plus/Pro subscribers around the world are receiving a reset in the bank! Happy Codexing!

How better to spend an evening after a great conference, than a slow boat out to sea! We had a great time at @AICouncilConf and our accompanying event Ship It, co-hosted with @lancedb and @motherduck. Our Head of AI @BEBischof led a talk track on inference systems plus moderated "Modern Inference for Modern Workloads" -- with @zedlewski of @togethercompute; Tuomas Rintamäki from @nvidia's OSS LLMs, and @charles_irl of @modal -- unpacking why a dedicated inference provider is necessary when OpenAI already exists. Dig into all of our learnings: theoryvc.com/blog-posts/ai-…

Join @ttunguz and Sunil Agrawal, CISO at @glean & Emmy-award-winning technology innovator with 40+ security patents, next Thursday for a virtual Office Hours on battling AI adversaries. Sunil previously served as Bolt's Head of Security and held security leadership roles at Nutanix, Netflix, Adobe, and more. With frontier models in attackers' hands, phishing is flawless, exploit code writes itself, and deepfake calls are clearing wire transfers. 📅 Thursday, July 9th ⏰ 9 AM PDT / 12 PM EDT gatsby.events/theory-venture…

As token costs keep climbing 📈, where else can we find efficiency gains? Partner @SpencerFarrar dug into how @sailresearchco is answering this question with more efficient inference and long-horizon agents. We're proud to back their Series A.

@aiDotEngineer 2/3 Two side events if you want off the floor 🕺 Tuesday 6/30: LocalServe at SPIN SF with @TheoryVC and @Ollama. Ping pong tournament, drinks, and infra conversations. Register: luma.com/localserve