Theory Ventures

Have you ever had that “wow” moment with AI? Picture this: hours of meeting notes distilled into a crisp summary in mere seconds. At Theory, we’re peeling back the layers on how AI is about to shake up our daily grind. Will AI be our trusty sidekick, boosting our productivity, or will it completely change the game? Whether you’re in sales outreach or strategic planning, find out where AI will have your back and where it might turn things upside down. We are only on the first couple pages of this story but know it will be a big one. If you’re building AI systems to transform traditional business functions, we’d love to hear from you at info@theory.ventures. #AI #Innovation #FutureOfWork #KnowledgeWork #TheoryVentures

We are thrilled to lead Allium's $16.5 million Series A funding, advancing the future of blockchain data management in a market now worth $2.5 trillion. Allium provides enterprise-grade blockchain data solutions, serving prestigious clients like Visa, Stripe, and the Uniswap Foundation with unparalleled accuracy and efficiency. Supporting Allium in revolutionizing how organizations access and utilize blockchain data with their powerful APIs, Allium Explorer and Allium Developer is something we are very excited to be a part of. We look forward to a future where blockchain data management is seamless, secure, and universally accessible. Learn more about Allium’s innovative approach at www.allium.so #Blockchain #DataManagement #Cryptoassets #Web3 #Investment #Innovation #TheoryInvests

Explore the future of technology in our latest blog post on composable software platforms — learn how modern infrastructure and AI automation are setting the stage for software that adapts dynamically to business needs, enabling automation and efficient workflows. Interested in composable software? We'd love to connect at info@theory.ventures! #ComposableSoftware #AI #Innovation

Launching our 2024 GTM Survey 📝

What does it take to go public? Has it changed over the last 15 years?

2012 was the year of the Seedpocalypse. Also called the Series A Crunch, a fear gripped Startupland : raising a Series A. Two years later, this indigestible excessive bolus of fundraising rounds hit the Series B market & Series Bs became the most challenging round to raise. Read More: https://lnkd.in/g2nRdupg

What stood out to me in yesterday’s Apple announcement wasn’t the headline, but the subtitle. “Setting a new standard in privacy.” For privacy to become one of the leading selling points of software, competitive dynamics & user preferences have evolved. The mantra repeated over the last 20 years on the internet has been privacy is dead. Users simply don’t care. People are willing to trade their privacy for free & targeted experiences. Since 2020, Apple has marketed their products as the private alternativepoking fun at how public we all are about the minutia of our lives. Apple is competing using the challenger sale : Apple is telling the market, to use AI, you should want private AI, you should want to control your own data because it’s valuable. Apple’s massive distribution will affect consumer & enterprise preferences. It’s already happening. Enterprises push for their data to be under their control in virtual private clouds, in open data formats like Iceberg, to run AI models in their own environments - the cloud-prem architecture. These models are their intellectual property & a key competitive advantage. We’ve all learned Google’s core search business - arguably the best business model on the internet - is the commercialization of a machine learning algorithm from user & enterprise data. Fool me once… The broader market has realized how valuable data can be - both users who provide it & businesses who leverage it. These changing preferences will create demand for new architectures : software products that run in customer environments where the data remains in control of the user & buyer. This architectural shift creates a massive new opportunity for software startups to challenge the multi-tenant, centralized data incumbents with their own privacy-focused challenger sale. Many will debate whether the architecture is truly private. Is Apple using secure enclaves & SGXs, OpenAI promising not to log queries from Apple users, & users opting-in to sending their data to OpenAI private enough? Will Google rearchitect Gemini to do the same thing to power Apple products? https://lnkd.in/g-ukCuGt

We are proud to lead Tobiko Data's $17.3 million Series A funding, driving advancements in data transformation frameworks for efficient and scalable data management. Excited to support Tobiko in revolutionizing how organizations handle data pipelines with SQLMesh and look forward to a future where data transformation is both simple and powerful with Tobiko Data.

We suffer from a cognitive bias : work performed by a human is likely more trustworthy because we understand the biases & the limitations. AIs are a Schrodinger’s cat stuffed in a black box. We don’t comprehend how the box works (yet), nor can we believe our eyes if the feline is dead or alive when we see it. New AI product on-boarding will need to mitigate this bias. One path may be starting with low-value tasks where the software-maker has tested exhaustively the potential inputs & outputs. Another tactic may be to provide a human-in-the-loop to check the AI’s work. Citations, references, & other forms of fact-checking will be a core part of the product experience. Independent testing might be another path. As with any new colleague, the first impressions & a series of small wins will determine the person’s trust. Severe errors in the future will erode confidence, that must be rebuilt - likely with the help of human support teams who will explain, develop tests for the future, & assure users. I recently asked a financial LLM to analyze NVIDIA’s annual report. A question about the company’s increase in dividend amount vaporized its credibility, raising the question : is it less work to do the analysis myself than to check the AI’s work? That will be the trust fall for AI. Will the software catch us if we trust it?

In our latest blog post, we're exploring the interaction between websites and AI agents — including our predictions for how web infrastructure will change to support AI agents. If you’re building a company around LLM-based agents, we’d love to hear from you at info@theory.ventures!