Obvious Ventures, co-founded by Twitter’s Evan Williams, has secured its fifth fund, totaling $360,360,360.
James Joaquin, the firm’s co-founder and managing director, stated that the company invests in advanced fields of math, science, and physics, and incorporates mathematical themes into its fund numbers.
Previous funds also featured unique numerical values: the first was $123,456,789, the second was $191,919,191 (a palindrome), the third was $271,828,182 (Euler’s number), and the fourth, announced in mid-2022, was another palindrome at $355,111,553.
The latest fund’s size, however, reflects the firm’s investment philosophy rather than just mathematical curiosity. After twelve years, Obvious Ventures states this figure symbolizes a comprehensive approach to its three core investment areas: planetary health, human health, and economic health.
Joaquin emphasized the importance of a 360-degree perspective in each area, noting that understanding past successes and failures is crucial.
According to Joaquin, the firm’s strategy involves maintaining fund sizes that allow a single successful public company investment to potentially return the entire fund. This focus on durability is partly influenced by past experiences, such as Beyond Meat, which initially soared to over $14 billion in market capitalization after its 2019 IPO but later dropped below a billion by late 2022.
Despite challenges, the firm has provided significant cash distributions to limited partners from its core funds and has supported several companies through successful public-market exits. Examples include Planet Labs, a satellite imagery company invested in by Obvious Ventures in 2015, which went public via SPAC in 2021 and is now valued at around $8.5 billion. Recursion Pharmaceuticals, a Series A investment, holds a market capitalization exceeding $2 billion.
The firm also made an early investment in Gusto, an HR and payroll platform, which was recently valued at more than $9 billion in the private market and is anticipated to pursue an IPO.
With only 17% of venture capital firms successfully raising more than three funds, according to Sapphire Partners, Obvious Ventures’ latest fundraise establishes its position as a significant VC entity.
Joaquin noted that reaching a fifth fund is a significant achievement within the venture capital industry.
While Obvious Ventures uses creative fund sizes, its commitment to investing in startups that create a positive global impact is a core principle. Joaquin highlighted various investments across the firm’s three pillars.
In the planetary health sector, the firm invested in Zanskar, a startup leveraging proprietary data and AI to identify and utilize geothermal energy. Zanskar recently announced a $115 million Series C, with Obvious Ventures having led its previous funding round. Joaquin pointed out that Zanskar’s geothermal power could support AI data centers with high energy demands.
For human health, Obvious Ventures highlighted its investment in Inceptive, an AI platform focused on molecule development. Inceptive was founded by Jakob Uszkoreit, a key author of the “Attention Is All You Need” paper, which introduced the transformer architecture foundational to generative AI.
Regarding economic health, Dexterity Robotics was mentioned. This company, valued at $1.65 billion last year, develops humanoids designed to perform repetitive, hazardous, or unpleasant tasks in warehouses and factories, currently handled by human workers.
Beyond Joaquin, Obvious Ventures includes four other active investors, such as co-founder Vishal Vasishth, with Ev Williams serving as a co-founder and adviser. The firm plans to make around 10 investments each year, with check sizes between $5 million and $12 million for seed and Series A startups.
