Obvious Ventures lands fund five with a 360-degree view of planetary, human, economic health

Obvious Ventures, the firm co-founded by Twitter’s Evan Williams, has raised a fifth fund, and this one, just like its predecessors, comes with a “fun” number: $360,360,360.

“We invest in the frontiers of math and science and physics, and we like to celebrate math in our fund numbers as well,” James Joaquin (pictured far right), the firm’s co-founder and managing director, told TechCrunch.

The firm’s first fund was $123,456,789, and the second was $191,919,191 (a palindromic number that reads the same forward and backwards). The third was $271,828,182 (which mathematicians and engineers instantly recognize as e, or Euler’s number), while the fourth fund, announced in mid-2022, continued the tradition as another palindrome at $355,111,553.

If you haven’t guessed it by now, the meaning of Obvious Ventures’ newest fund size is a little less about geeky math and more about the firm’s investing philosophy. Twelve years into its journey, Obvious says the figure represents a full-circle perspective on its three broad focus areas: planetary health, human health, and economic health.

“We love the metaphor of taking a 360-degree view in each of those areas,” Joaquin said. “You have to be a student of the past to understand what’s worked and what hasn’t worked.”

What’s working for the firm, according to Joaquin, is keeping its fund sizes small enough so that a single investment, if it becomes a durable public company, has the opportunity to return the entire fund. Joaquin likely placed an emphasis on durability in part because one of Obvious Ventures’ initial winners, Beyond Meat, reached a market capitalization of over $14 billion shortly after its 2019 IPO, but had fallen to below a billion by late 2022.   

Still, Joaquin says the firm has seen meaningful cash distributions to limited partners from all of its core funds, and it boasts several companies with successful public-market exits. In 2015, Obvious Ventures invested in the satellite imagery company Planet Labs, which went public via a SPAC in 2021 and is currently valued at approximately $8.5 billion. Meanwhile, its Series A investment in Recursion Pharmaceuticals maintains a market capitalization of over $2 billion.

Obvious is also an early investor in the HR and payroll platform Gusto, which was most recently valued at more than $9 billion in the private market and is widely considered to be on an IPO trajectory.

In a venture capital environment where only 17% of firms successfully raise more than three funds, per research from Sapphire Partners, Obvious Ventures’ latest fundraise solidifies the firm as an established VC player.

“We made it to fund five, which is actually a big deal in the venture landscape,” Joaquin said.

Obvious Ventures may take a playful approach to fund sizes, but its focus on investing in startups that make a positive impact on the world is serious. Joaquin pointed to several investments in each of the firm’s three pillars.

Within the planetary health sector, the firm invested in Zanskar, a startup using proprietary data and AI to identify and harness geothermal energy, one of the most cost-effective power sources available. Just last week, Zanskar announced a $115 million Series C. Obvious Ventures, which led the company’s previous round, is particularly excited about the investment. Joaquin noted that the geothermal power harnessed by Zanskar can help fuel energy-hungry AI data centers.

In its human health strategy, Obvious Ventures touted its investment in Inceptive, an AI platform for molecule development. Inceptive was founded by Jakob Uszkoreit, one of the primary authors of the seminal “Attention Is All You Need” paper, which introduced the transformer architecture, the breakthrough behind generative AI.

In the area of economic health, Joaquin pointed to Dexterity Robotics. The company, which was valued at $1.65 billion last year, builds humanoids to handle “dull, dirty, and dangerous” tasks currently performed by humans in warehouses and factories.

In addition to Joaquin, Obvious Ventures has four active investors, including co-founder Vishal Vasishth. (Ev Williams remains a co-founder and an adviser.) The firm intends to make approximately 10 investments annually, with check sizes ranging from $5 million to $12 million for seed and Series A startups.