Obvious Ventures, the venture capital firm co-founded by Twitter’s Evan Williams, has raised its fifth fund. The new fund continues the firm’s tradition of using mathematically significant numbers, coming in at $360,360,360. James Joaquin, the firm’s co-founder and managing director, explained that as they invest in the frontiers of math and science, they like to celebrate math in their fund numbers as well.
This pattern began with the first fund at $123,456,789. The second fund was $191,919,191, a palindrome. The third fund was $271,828,182, which is recognized as Euler’s number, or e. The fourth fund, announced in mid-2022, was another palindrome at $355,111,553.
The meaning behind the newest fund’s size, however, is 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, 360-degree perspective on its three broad focus areas: planetary health, human health, and economic health. Joaquin stated that you have to be a student of the past to understand what has worked and what has not.
The firm keeps its fund sizes deliberately small so that a single investment, if it becomes a durable public company, can potentially return the entire fund. This emphasis on durability is notable given the trajectory of an early winner, Beyond Meat. After its 2019 IPO, Beyond Meat reached a market capitalization of over $14 billion but had fallen to below a billion by late 2022. Despite such volatility, Joaquin says the firm has seen meaningful cash distributions to its limited partners from all its core funds.
Obvious Ventures boasts several companies with successful public-market exits. It invested in satellite imagery company Planet Labs in 2015, which went public via a SPAC in 2021 and is currently valued at approximately $8.5 billion. Its Series A investment in Recursion Pharmaceuticals maintains a market capitalization of over $2 billion. The firm 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 research indicates only 17 percent of firms successfully raise more than three funds, Obvious Ventures’ latest fundraise solidifies it as an established player. Reaching a fifth fund is a significant milestone in the venture landscape.
While playful with fund sizes, Obvious Ventures maintains a serious focus on investing in startups that make a positive impact. Joaquin pointed to several investments in each of the firm’s three pillars. Within planetary health, the firm invested in Zanskar, a startup using data and AI to identify geothermal energy. Zanskar recently announced a $115 million Series C round, and its technology is seen as a potential power source for energy-hungry AI data centers.
In human health, the firm touts its investment in Inceptive, an AI platform for molecule development founded by Jakob Uszkoreit, a primary author of the seminal “Attention is All You Need” paper that introduced the transformer architecture.
For economic health, Joaquin highlighted Dexterity Robotics, which builds humanoids for warehouse and factory tasks. The company was valued at $1.65 billion last year.
In addition to Joaquin, Obvious Ventures has four active investors, including co-founder Vishal Vasishth. Evan Williams remains a co-founder and adviser. The firm intends to make roughly 10 investments per year, with check sizes ranging from $5 million to $12 million for Seed and Series A startups.