Robert Theis
General Partner & Chief Investment Officer @ World Innovation Lab
San Francisco, United States
Robert Theis is a Series C investor at World Innovation Lab in San Francisco focused on SaaS and Software. Rob Theis is General Partner, Chief Investment Officer with 18 years of venture capital experience and invests in a broad range of multi-stage technology companies with exceptional growth potential. Some of his investments include Automation Anywhere, BirdEye, BrightRoll, Digital Shadows, DocuSign, Fortinet, HubSpot, PGP, RingCentral, andVanceInfo. Rob works closely with committed entrepreneurs to create businesses that become leaders in their respective markets. He has invested in over 25 companies creating an aggregate capitalization of $42 Billion with 7 IPOs and 11 acquisitions.Rob spent his earlier career as an early employee for Silicon Graphics (SGI) as their product manager for IRIS Series Workstations. Later, he joined Sun Microsystems and went on to take executive roles to accelerate various business units into market leading positions. In 1996, he joined Rick Adam & Harold Piskiel from Goldman Sachs to create New Era of Networks (NASDAQ:NEON), the first enterprise software platform to integrate corporate applications and the internet which he helped grow to $200 million revenue in 4 years.Rob has a BA in Economics & Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh. He’s an avid rock climber, scuba diver, sailboat racer, and a member of the Sheriff’s Search & Rescue Team.
- Total investments:
- 23
- Last investment:
- Lead investor:
- 17%
Last updated:
For AI agents: llms.txt
Industries Robert Theis invests in
Stages Robert Theis invests in
Countries Robert Theis invests in
Contacts
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Investment Focus
Industry
- SaaS 8 (35%)
- Software 6 (26%)
- Enterprise Software 6 (26%)
- Artificial Intelligence 6 (26%)
- Agentic AI 4 (17%)
Stage
- Series C 7 (30%)
- Series B 5 (22%)
- Series D 3 (13%)
- Series E 3 (13%)
- Series A 2 (9%)
Investments
| Company | Description | Round | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cresta uses artificial intelligence to assist sales and service agents with customer service tasks. it provides tools for managing inquiries. Cresta focuses on facilitating communication between agents and customers. | $125M / Series D / Nov 19, 2024 | ||
| R-Zero offers smart building technology that delivers real-time insights on optimizing indoor spaces to improve workforce productivity, predict real estate needs, and create operational efficiencies, including reducing energy costs. R-Zero’s smart building solutions include IAQ and comfort monitoring, high-efficiency HVAC filtration, spaceutilization sensors, occupancy-based building controls, and real estate performance analytics. R-Zero’s connected platform is easy-to-use, secure, and scalable, enabling owners, operators, and their tenants, to prepare their buildings for tomorrow's challenges. | $105M / Series C / Feb 16, 2023 | ||
| R-Zero offers smart building technology that delivers real-time insights on optimizing indoor spaces to improve workforce productivity, predict real estate needs, and create operational efficiencies, including reducing energy costs. R-Zero’s smart building solutions include IAQ and comfort monitoring, high-efficiency HVAC filtration, spaceutilization sensors, occupancy-based building controls, and real estate performance analytics. R-Zero’s connected platform is easy-to-use, secure, and scalable, enabling owners, operators, and their tenants, to prepare their buildings for tomorrow's challenges. | $105M / Series C / May 26, 2022 | ||
| R-Zero offers smart building technology that delivers real-time insights on optimizing indoor spaces to improve workforce productivity, predict real estate needs, and create operational efficiencies, including reducing energy costs. R-Zero’s smart building solutions include IAQ and comfort monitoring, high-efficiency HVAC filtration, spaceutilization sensors, occupancy-based building controls, and real estate performance analytics. R-Zero’s connected platform is easy-to-use, secure, and scalable, enabling owners, operators, and their tenants, to prepare their buildings for tomorrow's challenges. | $50M / Series B / Jun 16, 2021 | ||
| PrizePool is a mobile-based application software that enables its users to invest their money through smartphones. PrizePool believes the team's experience combined with the commitments to both guarantee monthly prizes and create a social, referral model sets PrizePool apart from others in the market. | $10M / Series A / May 02, 2021 | ||
| Sendbird is the omnichannel AI agent platform enterprises choose to elevate customer experience, by initiating autonomous support & sales conversations, keeping humans in the loop for complex inquiries, and re-engaging customers with proactive business messages. Combining omnichannel AI and a battle-tested, award-winning communication APIs,Sendbird enables businesses to build AI agents and meaningful customer connections at scale. Trusted by 4,000+ leading apps—including DoorDash, Match Group, Noom, and Yahoo Sports—Sendbird powers over 7 billion conversations every month, offering exceptional reliability, security, and compliance that meet enterprise-level demands.Headquartered in California, Sendbird is backed by ICONIQ, SoftBank, Tiger Global, Y Combinator, and other reputable investors. | $100M / Series C / Apr 06, 2021 | ||
| Aisera’s AI Agent Platform is a multi-agent system that consists of a universal agent for request orchestration, domain agents with contextual intelligence across IT, HR, Finance, Procurement, and more, and task agents that execute tasks through integrations with ServiceNow, Workday, Salesforce, and other enterprise systems. The platform isfuture-proof and vendor-agnostic, enabling organizations to deploy out-of-the-box agentic solutions or custom-build agents on the same platform. Designed as a horizontal solution, it scales seamlessly across all enterprise functions to deliver autonomous self-service, personalized resolutions, omnichannel engagement, and enterprise-wide productivity gains. Aisera Assistant, grounded in enterprise data and ontologies, delivers instant self-service by enabling employees to securely access information and execute actions across enterprise applications and systems. Embedded in collaboration channels like Slack and Microsoft Teams, it understands context, supports digital and voice channels, provides proactive notifications, retrieves knowledge from public and private sources, extracts insights from documents, and works seamlessly across multiple languages. With capabilities that drive a zero ticket service desk, maximize case deflection, and reduce MTTD and MTTR, Aisera Assistant transforms user experiences.Aisera’s Agent Assist leverages domain-specific LLMs to enhance agent productivity with contextual answers, case summarization, and next-best action recommendations. Embedded into platforms like ServiceNow, Zendesk, and Salesforce, it enables real-time knowledge retrieval, swarm collaboration, case identification, and case wrap-up - empowering agents to resolve complex issues faster. Aisera's AI Agent platform delivers exponential cost efficiencies, higher organizational productivity and an enhanced user experience, enabling enterprises to autonomously understand, reason, and proactively fulfill requests through AI agents. | $40M / Series C / Dec 11, 2020 | ||
| Gorgias is a one-of-a-kind customer service platform specifically designed for ecommerce businesses to deliver effortless customer service at every stage of growth. With cutting-edge automation and AI capabilities, Gorgias revolutionizes how online stores interact with their customers by providing efficient and personalized support across email,voice, SMS, live chat, and social media channels.Founded in 2015, Gorgias began as a two-person team and has grown to more than 250 employees and eight offices in San Francisco, New York, Charlotte, Toronto, Buenos Aires, Paris, Lisbon, and Sydney. As a certified B Corporation, Gorgias is proud to be a leader in sustainable and equitable workplace practices.Today, Gorgias serves 12,000+ merchants in the ecommerce space, including Steve Madden, Glossier, BruMate, and TUSHY. | $25M / Series B / Dec 10, 2020 | ||
| PrizePool is a mobile-based application software that enables its users to invest their money through smartphones. PrizePool believes the team's experience combined with the commitments to both guarantee monthly prizes and create a social, referral model sets PrizePool apart from others in the market. | $4.3M / Seed / Aug 28, 2020 | ||
| AAuth0 is an identity management platform for application builders and developers. It provides Auth0, a web-scale cloud solution that includes APIs and tools that enable developers to eliminate the friction of authentication and authorization of their applications and APIs.Auth0 enables users to single sign-on for applications running on variousplatforms with various identity providers; add few lines of JavaScript to power their applications; customize various stages of the authentication and authorization pipeline, and connect their applications and APIs to their database of users and passwords. Its platform also allows users to authenticate to active directory, LDAP, SAML, Integrated Windows Authentication, Google Apps, Salesforce, and other IdPs without having to configure firewall; add and remove users, modify profiles and authorization attributes, and identify root cause user login issues; see a stream of recent logins and their locations; and enable various SaaS and SAML-enabled applications.Auth0's solution works with iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 8 platforms. Its platform is used by large and small enterprises, and startups. | $120M / Series F / Jul 14, 2020 | ||
| See all 23 investments → | |||
Co-Investors
About World Innovation Lab
WiL (World Innovation Lab) is a venture capital firm that partners with leading global corporations and government entities in Japan and Asia. With offices in Palo Alto, California, and Tokyo, the firm’s mission is to serve as a bridge between startups and corporations in the United States and Asia, with a particular focus on Japan. WiL supportsits portfolio companies by establishing corporate partnerships that enable U.S. and European startups to scale globally, and Japanese startups to innovate and globalize. WiL invests in emerging technology spanning fintech, insurtech, automation and productivity, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, developer tools, health tech and sustainability. Notable WiL investments that have exited to public markets from Fund I and Fund II include Asana, Mercari, Raksul, Wise and Auth0 — whose acquisition by Okta was completed in May 2021. WiL also invests in exceptional venture funds, and supports its LPs in corporate venture investment efforts. WiL also works with its corporate investors on evolving their own innovation capabilities through new business creation, partnerships with leading startups, and organizational culture change. WiL acts as the bridge between startups and corporates across key innovation hubs around the globe in driving growth - starting with Japan and the US.
World Innovation Lab Contacts
| Name | Phone | Socials | |
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Aki -Chen Jiang
Investor and Partner
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Masaya Kubota
Partner
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Robert Theis
General Partner & Chief Investment Officer
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Takeshi Onishi
Partner
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Todd Grover
Principal
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FAQ
What does Robert Theis invest in?
Robert Theis invests primarily in SaaS, Software and Enterprise Software startups, most often at Series C and Series B stage. Most of the 23 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.
How do I contact Robert Theis?
Public channels for Robert Theis include LinkedIn, X (Twitter) and Facebook. For a verified work email and phone number, create a free Shizune account — contact data is searched across 20+ sources and validated before delivery, so your outreach lands in the right inbox.
When did Robert Theis last invest?
The most recent investment recorded for Robert Theis closed in Nov 2024. Shizune tracks 23 investments in total for this profile, including round sizes, stages and portfolio companies, all sourced from confirmed public funding rounds and refreshed monthly.
Is Shizune's investor data accurate?
Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Oct 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.
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