The firm was started in 2023 by Tomasz Tunguz, a former managing director at venture capital firm Redpoint. Tunguz made his name at Redpoint with investing wins like data analytics company Looker—sold to Google-parent Alphabet for $2.6 billion in 2019—and customer service software startup Kustomer, acquired by Facebook-parent Meta in 2020 for a reported $1 billion. 

This second fund of $450 million is a major step up from last year’s first fund of $230 million. To date, Tunguz and Theory’s investments include data infrastructure platform Allium, blockchain infrastructure company Initia (last valued at $350 million), and open source data operations startup Tobiko. 

Theory describes itself as a “theory-driven” firm, and tends to invest in enterprise software, AI, crypto, and data tools. Among the early VC bloggers with a substantial social media following, Tunguz co-wrote a book called Winning with Data in 2016. 

Theory Ventures declined comment.