Tomasz Tunguz, who founded Theory Ventures after more than 14 years with Redpoint Ventures, has raised his second fund in just 19 months.
Tunguz has closed on $450 million for Theory’s sophomore fund, about 90 percent more than the $238 million he raised for his first fund in April 2023.
Fundraising appears to have taken less than a month. The San Francisco-based firm filed a Form D with the SEC on October 31 showing a target of $450 million for Fund II. It has not filed an updated Form D revealing how many investors committed to the fund.
Theory did not disclose the names of investors in Fund II. LPs in Fund I included The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, according to fundraising data from affiliate title Buyouts. Guardian Life was also an investor in Redpoint’s most recent flagship fund, Redpoint Ventures IX, which closed on $650 million, in August 2022. Other LPs in that Redpoint fund include the Brockton Retirement System, the National Grid USA Pension Plan and Richard King Mellon Foundation, Buyouts reports.
Theory targets early-stage software investments across data, AI and Web3, usually investing $1 million to $25 million per deal. The firm’s website does not list portfolio companies.
Crunchbase reports that Theory has made seven investments in six companies, leading six of the deals. The firm led Series A investments in Initia Labs, a blockchain company; Alium, a blockchain data platform; Tobiko Data, a data infrastructure company; and Dropzone AI, which is developing autonomous AI security agents, Crunchbase says. Theory also participated in a seed round for Superlinked, which is developing a compute framework for turning complex data into vector embeddings, according to Crunchbase.
In a statement about Fund II, Theory noted that it recently led a $20 million investment in Omni, a developer of “modern business intelligence software,” and also invested in Context.ai, an evaluation and analytics platform for applications powered by large language models.
Tunguz was not available for comment before press time.
“I’ve spent my career studying start-ups — working for two and investing in many, with seven achieving unicorn status,” he said in a statement. “I launched Theory Ventures last year driven by the belief that the rise of AI and transformer architecture, along with the mainstream adoption of crypto and blockchain, present transformative opportunities for start-ups.”
Iris Dorbian contributed to this story
Tomasz Tunguz, who founded Theory Ventures after more than 14 years with Redpoint Ventures, has raised his second fund in just 19 months.
Tunguz has closed on $450 million for Theory’s sophomore fund, about 90 percent more than the $238 million he raised for his first fund in April 2023.
Fundraising appears to have taken less than a month. The San Francisco-based firm filed a Form D with the SEC on October 31 showing a target of $450 million for Fund II. It has not filed an updated Form D revealing how many investors committed to the fund.
Theory did not disclose the names of investors in Fund II. LPs in Fund I included The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, according to fundraising data from affiliate title Buyouts. Guardian Life was also an investor in Redpoint’s most recent flagship fund, Redpoint Ventures IX, which closed on $650 million, in August 2022. Other LPs in that Redpoint fund include the Brockton Retirement System, the National Grid USA Pension Plan and Richard King Mellon Foundation, Buyouts reports.
Theory targets early-stage software investments across data, AI and Web3, usually investing $1 million to $25 million per deal. The firm’s website does not list portfolio companies.
Crunchbase reports that Theory has made seven investments in six companies, leading six of the deals. The firm led Series A investments in Initia Labs, a blockchain company; Alium, a blockchain data platform; Tobiko Data, a data infrastructure company; and Dropzone AI, which is developing autonomous AI security agents, Crunchbase says. Theory also participated in a seed round for Superlinked, which is developing a compute framework for turning complex data into vector embeddings, according to Crunchbase.
In a statement about Fund II, Theory noted that it recently led a $20 million investment in Omni, a developer of “modern business intelligence software,” and also invested in Context.ai, an evaluation and analytics platform for applications powered by large language models.
Tunguz was not available for comment before press time.
“I’ve spent my career studying start-ups — working for two and investing in many, with seven achieving unicorn status,” he said in a statement. “I launched Theory Ventures last year driven by the belief that the rise of AI and transformer architecture, along with the mainstream adoption of crypto and blockchain, present transformative opportunities for start-ups.”
Iris Dorbian contributed to this story
