Obvious Ventures, co-founded by Twitter’s Evan Williams, has raised its fifth fund, and like its predecessor, this one comes with a “fun” number of $360,360,360.
“We invest at the forefront of math, science and physics, and we want to celebrate math in our fund numbers,” James Joaquin (pictured far right), co-founder and managing director of the firm, told TechCrunch.
The company’s first funding was $123,456,789 and its second funding was $191,919,191 (palindromic numbers are the same whether read from the front or back). The third fund was $271,828,182 (mathematicians and engineers immediately recognize this as e (Euler’s number)), and the fourth fund, announced in mid-2022, continued the tradition as another palindrome with $355,111,553.
In case you haven’t guessed already, the implications of Ovvious Ventures’ latest fund size are less about geeky math and more about the company’s investment philosophy. After 12 years, Obvious says the numbers represent a holistic view across three broad focus areas: planetary health, human health and economic health.
“We love the metaphor of having a 360-degree view of each area,” Joaquin said. “We need to study the past to understand what worked and what didn’t.”
What works well for the company, Joaquín said, is that it keeps the fund small enough that if it becomes a durable publicly traded company, there is an opportunity to recoup the entire fund in a single investment. Joaquin’s emphasis on durability may be in part because Beyond Meat, one of Ovvious Ventures’ first winners, reached a market cap of more than $14 billion shortly after its 2019 IPO, but its market cap fell below $1 billion by late 2022.
Still, Joaquin said the firm has seen meaningful cash distributions from all core funds to limited partners and boasts several companies that have successfully exited the public markets. In 2015, Obvious Ventures invested in satellite imaging company Planet Labs, which went public through a SPAC in 2021 and is currently valued at about $8.5 billion. Meanwhile, the Series A investment in Recursion Pharmaceuticals maintains a market cap of over $2 billion.
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Obvious is also an early investor in HR and payroll platform Gusto. Gusto was recently valued at more than $9 billion in the private markets and is widely believed to be on track for an IPO.
Ovvious Ventures’ latest funding solidifies the company as an established VC player in a venture capital landscape where only 17% of companies successfully raise three or more funds, according to research by Sapphire Partners.
“We successfully raised five funds, which is really big for the venture industry,” Joaquin said.
Obvious Ventures may have a playful approach to funding size, but it’s serious in its focus on investing in startups that have a positive impact on the world. Joaquin pointed to several investments in each of the company’s three pillars.
In the planetary health space, the company invested in Zanskar, a startup that uses 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 investment. Obvious Ventures, which led the company’s previous round, is particularly excited about this investment. Joaquín pointed out that the geothermal power that Zanskar utilizes could help refuel energy-hungry AI data centers.
Obvious Ventures touted its investment in Inceptive, an AI platform for molecular development, in its human health strategy. Inceptive was founded by Jakob Uszkoreit, one of the lead authors of the seminal paper “Attending Is All You Need,” which introduced Transformer Architecture, the breakthrough behind generative AI.
In the area of economic health, Joaquín cited Dexterity Robotics. The company, valued at $1.65 billion last year, is developing humanoids to handle “tedious, 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 Vashish. (Ev Williams will continue as co-founder and advisor.) The firm plans to make approximately 10 investments per year in seed and Series A startups with check sizes ranging from $5 million to $12 million.
