Tomasz Tunguz

Theory Ventures

Student of startups, author of tomtunguz.com, investor, & partner to founders.

General Partner

Redpoint Ventures

Privileged to support the journey of early stage SaaS, data and infrastructure founders. Worked with Looker ($2.6b M&A), MotherDuck, Mysten Labs (SUI), Monte Carlo, Omni, Chorus ($575m to ZI), Expensify (IPO), ThredUp (IPO), Kustomer ($1b sale to META), & others.

Managing Director

Winning with Data

I co-authored Winning with Data with Looker CEO Frank Bien.  Winning with Data: Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People, and Shape the Future explores  the cultural changes big data brings to business, and shows you how to adapt your organization to leverage data to maximum effect.

Co-Author

Google, Inc.

Managing AdSense for Social Networks including the $900M MySpace deal.
Managed AdSense International including product launches in Greece, Israel, Thailand, Indonesia and Bulgaria

Product Manager

Appian Corporation

Architected, developed and deployed systems for the US Government serving DHS

Engineer

Student of Startups
Backer of 9 unicorns
Author of http://tomtunguz.com 
Subscribe https://ttunguz.kit.com/ef0a779b9c

Founder

Private equity firms have emerged as the newest distribution channel for AI startups.

While public companies have decreased from 6,639 in 2000 to 3,550 in 2024, PE-owned companies in the US have grown from 1,950 to 14,300. The rate of growth continues to accelerate.

The crossover happened in 2009, when PE inventory overtook public company counts for the first time. By 2024, PE-backed companies outnumber public firms by roughly 4:1.

The shift is driven by the massive expansion of PE ownership across corporate America.

That’s not to say the sizes of PE-owned companies are the same as publics. In fact, they are smaller.

The point isn’t that startups previously focused on public companies. Rather, the data reveals the immense scale of private equity portfolios.

(second image)

Data Sources : CRSP, Wilshire 5000, PitchBook, American Investment Council, Citizens Bank.

The mid-market profile of these PE-owned companies suits AI startups’ desires for faster sales cycles.

Plus, the profit motive of private equity aligns perfectly with AI startups’ capacity to cut costs & drive efficiency. PE firms acquire companies to improve margins & operational performance before exit.

AI tools that reduce headcount, automate processes, or accelerate workflows deliver exactly what PE operating partners need.

A private equity firm owning 25 companies proves value in one or two before rolling out to the entire portfolio. Control enables rapid deployment. This creates an efficient channel for AI startups to demonstrate value & cross-sell.

PE firms gain operational leverage while AI startups access more than 14,000 motivated buyers. This new go-to-market motion redefines how AI software reaches the market, bypassing the traditional enterprise sales grind in favor of networks that can deploy at scale.

Indus Khaitan

Redblock

Redblock’s mission is to remove the drudgery of repetitive "eye on the glass screen” work done by Security Teams. 

Automation is one of the key jobs-to-be-done for AI in cybersecurity. The field is overwhelmed with signals, alerts, and threat activity—AI could provide a significant helping hand.

To reinvent how Security Teams work, we are developing AI products that learn to increase productivity by automating rote tasks.

The consumer-like security audit experience of our AI Agent for Twitter is how we see Cybersecurity products.

We're hiring for Sales, GTM, Product, and AI Engineering: firstname at redblock dot ai

Founder and Sales Engineer

Quolum

"Once upon a time, lived a French weaver and merchant, Joseph Jacquard. He invented the automation of textile loom operations using a series of programmable punched-cards." That's how I open the bedtime story of SaaS to my kids. 
--

Quolum is a full-stack SaaS Spend Management product that sits at the intersection of Finance + Procurement. 

To achieve responsible SaaS consumption, we:

* Track feature-level utilization of SaaS apps
* Tame long tail spend by integrating with expense cards and accounting systems
* Reduce FinOps drudgery by aggregating contracts and invoices

CEO and Founder

Chargebee

When I learned about Chargebee and their mission to simplify subscription billing for businesses, I knew I had to be a part of it. A secondary goal was to learn how SMB customer acquisition and fintech works. 

I started the Growth organization and helped orchestrate efforts across Marketing, Product, and Partnerships. The Growth Team at Chargebee ran several parallel initiatives to target 100 basis points increment across each of the awareness, acquisition, activation, and retention funnels.

Chief of Growth

Sequoia Capital

I was embedded with Sequoia portfolio companies--my role was to take them to their next orbit. I have had the privilege of working with a couple of companies:

1. As CEO designate of the Bangalore-based DevOps startup Calm.io, I played a key role in its acquisition by Nutanix. My contributions included guiding the company's strategic direction, leading the team, and ensuring the company was positioned for successful acquisition.

2. As CMO and Head of Products at SirionLabs, a Gurgaon-based contract management SaaS, I helped to build the company's brand and drive growth through effective marketing and product strategy. I was responsible for defining and executing the go-to-market plan, managing the product roadmap and ensuring customer satisfaction.

Advisor

Oracle

As a Product Manager for Mobile Security and Mobile Analytics, I collaborated with cross-functional teams in engineering, sales, and marketing to incubate and launch Oracle Mobile Security and Mobile Cloud Service, delivering it to Oracle's 300K customers.

* Owning Oracle's customer briefing sessions on mobile strategy, where I briefed visiting customers, CIOs, analysts, and press on the benefits and capabilities of Oracle's mobile products.
* Writing comprehensive sales playbooks and training the worldwide sales team on mobile products to ensure they were well-equipped to pitch the products effectively.
* Providing day-to-day deal support and customer demos to ensure customer satisfaction and successful adoption of the products.

Thanks to a concerted team effort, we achieved a 5X growth in Oracle Mobile Security revenues.

Senior Director, Product Management

Bitzer Mobile

Oracle acquired my BYOD security startup.

Bitzer Mobile was a cloud-based mobile security platform that enabled secure mobility for the enterprise workforce. We were the early pioneers of what later became an industry-wide phenomenon of SWG + BYOD + Secure Browsing. 

Bitzer Mobile's BYOD Security has been covered by prominent analyst firms such as Gartner, Forrester, VDC Research, and 451 Group. The company raised $4.75m in Series A from Acero Capital, Chevron Tech Ventures, and individual angels.

To take the company to the next level, I took on a wide range of responsibilities including:

* Establishing an India development center
* Hiring the first 15 engineers
* Creating the product and go-to-market strategy
* Designing the web services layer for the managed container
* Pivoting the company from a data integration platform to an identity and access avatar
* Briefing analysts on our technology
* Hunting for early customers to validate our product
* Writing code to bring our product to life

Through these efforts, we were able to bring Bitzer Mobile to the forefront of the mobile security industry and acquired Fortune 500 customers.

Co-Founder & Vice-President, Product Marketing

Practo Technologies Pvt Ltd

Practo, with its Healthcare IT product, is revolutionizing the way doctors run their clinics, manage the patient relationship, and reduce paperwork. Practo is an Indian poster-child of--an idea, two college buddies and a venture scout creating something out of thin air, from a figment of imagination to thousands of doctors using the product today. A high-performance team on their first dream run. 

Nurtured founder's vision, advised, seed invested, helped with product strategy, pricing, go-to-market, technical architecture, and fund-raising.

Practo has raised $125 million in multiple rounds from Sequoia Capital, Matrix Partners, Google Capital, Tencent, and Yuri Milner.

Board Member

The Morpheus / Morpheus Gang

Do you know what's more alluring than working for a Venture Capital firm? Starting one! Morpheus was a trail-blazer seed-stage venture fund and accelerator in India. The fund invested $12,000 each in 15 startups every year. 

Morpheus companies have raised follow-up rounds from Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Accel India, Blume Ventures, Battery Ventures, Kae Capital, Tiger Global, and several well-known angels. 

Advised/Invested in Emo2, Hiver, HackerRank, Jumadi (acquired by Via), Phitesla, Practo, Radbox, Reach Accountant, RedQuanta, RobotsAlive, Sarga, 99 Tests, Helpchat, Commonfloor (acquired by Quikr), Instamedia (acquired by Times Group), Crederity, DeskAway/BrightPod and five others that have since shut down.

Founding Partner

SezWho

Designed, architected, and developed tools to monitor social media. SezWho raised $1.3m and went to become one of the earliest social commentary aggregators. Built an infrastructure powering 75 million monthly page views with real-time aggregation, crawling, delivery. Targeted & achieved a 35-millisecond request round trip within our infrastructure using multiple helpings of hardware, software & common sense highly scalable design.

SezWho was acquired by Echo (http://aboutecho.com/)

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Tomasz Tunguz

Indus Khaitan

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The Battle

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Indus Khaitan

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Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Tomasz Tunguz's LinkedIn Performance

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