Software's Next Epoch: Our Investment in R.I.P. grep

What technology discontinuities birth new companies that define a generation of software?

At Theory Ventures, we’ve spent a lot of time on that question. We are concentrated, thesis-driven investors. We care about real technical shifts, durable platforms, and the kinds of products that emerge when the stack changes underneath them.

But markets are shaped just as much by decay as by invention. Businesses are full of detritus as innovation leaves behind abandoned architectures, bitter lessons, and best-practiced techniques. If you want to understand what matters next, it is no longer enough to study what is being born;

You also have to study what is dying.

The industry is extraordinarily good at tracking emergence, and surprisingly bad at tracking obsolescence.

As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no bubble. I take a look at the moats and realize there’s nothing left.

Today, Theory Ventures is proud to announce R.I.P. grep, our system for understanding the dead and dying.

‍

What’s dead can never die

Every cycle leaves behind an elephant graveyard of abandoned ideas – and despite real value created within businesses and markets – the populist tech community deems them unworthy. 

AI has produced an especially oversold cemetery.

• RAG is dead.
• Prompt engineering is dead.
• Evals are dead.
• Grep is dead.

and even,

• SaaS is dead.

This is not noise. This is data.

R.I.P. grep is Theory’s platform for tracking declarations of purported technological death. R.I.P. grep indexes the internet’s ongoing effort to bury things. It tracks claims that a technology, pattern, category, or market narrative has become obsolete, irrelevant, commoditized, or mildly irritating to an influencer.

Anyone can track launches. Anyone can track funding rounds. Anyone can build a dashboard of growth metrics. 

But who is recording these crucial markets’ death knells?

Where is the system-of-record for the moment (or moments!) a category crosses over from frontier to commodity to punchline?

That is the value R.I.P.-grep provides.

‍

The dead outnumber the living

To understand the value of these data, let’s look at RAG.

RAG is extremely dead – everyone knows that LLM’s don’t need high quality context from disparate systems or sources, and even if they do, context windows are near infinite. This is borne out by the data: 

and even though it has died 12 times, this time is definitely for real. It’s probably good to avoid this category as an investor and instead focus on Anthropic secondaries.

Similarly, vibe-coding is dead, and despite token-flexing dominating the feed, vibe-coding’s death is on the rise.

Coding agents' ubiquity is sure to crash now that vibe-coding is in the grave, so we know we should focus on fully agentic software. 

Somewhat paradoxically, MCP is also recently dead (the funeral is today):

Which leaves agents securely using enterprise data in a tricky situation, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out.

Last but not least, evals are dead. We know this one has seen a lot of flip-flopping from the influencers, but the data doesn’t lie. 

‍

With R.I.P. grep, we will continue to monitor the situation.

Theory Ventures concentrates on companies living in the future.

‍