Obvious Businessesthe company co-founded by Twitter’s Evan Williams has raised a fifth fund, and this one, like its predecessors, comes with a “fun” number: $360,360,360.
“We invest at the border of math and science and physics, and we like to celebrate math in our fund numbers as well,” James Joaquin (pictured right), the company’s co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.
The first fund of the company was $123,456,789 and the second was $191,919,191 (reverse number showing the same back and forth). The third was $271,828,182 (which mathematicians and engineers immediately 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 by now, the concept behind Obvious Ventures’ new capital size is less about geeky math and more about the company’s investment philosophy. Twelve years into its journey, Obvious says the scheme represents a full-circle perspective on its three broad areas of focus: planetary health, human health and financial health.
“We love bringing the 360-degree shooting to each of these areas,” said Joaquin. “You have to be a student of the past to understand what worked and what didn’t.”
What works for the company, according to Joaquin, is keeping its capital sizes small enough that a single investment, if it becomes a resilient public company, has a chance to return the entire capital. Joaquin likely emphasized resilience in part because one of Obvious Ventures’ initial winners, Beyond Meat, reached a market capitalization of more than 14 billion dollars shortly after the 2019 IPO, but had fallen below one billion end of 2022.
However, Joaquin says the firm has seen significant cash distributions to limited partners from all of its core funds and boasts several companies with successful public market exits. In 2015, Obvious Ventures invested in satellite imaging company Planet Labs, which floated through a SPAC in 2021 and is currently valued at about $8.5 billion. Meanwhile, its Series A investment in Recursion Pharmaceuticals maintains a market cap of more than $2 billion.
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Obvious is also an early investor in HR and payroll platform Gusto, which was recently valued at more than 9 billion dollars on the private market and is widely considered to be on track for an IPO.
In a venture capital environment where only 17% of businesses successfully raising more than three funds, per research from Sapphire Partners, Obvious Ventures’ latest fundraising solidifies the firm as an established VC player.
“We were able to fund five, which is actually a big deal in the business 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 company’s three pillars.
In planetary health, the company invested in Zanskar, a startup that uses proprietary data and artificial intelligence to identify and harness geothermal energy, one of the most cost-effective energy 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 power energy-intensive AI data centers.
In its human health strategy, Obvious Ventures touts its investment in Inceptive, an artificial intelligence platform for molecule development. Inceptive was founded by Jakob Uszkoreit, one of the lead authors of the seminal paper Attention Is All You Need, which introduced the transformer architecture, the breakthrough behind genetic artificial intelligence.
In the area of financial health, Joaquin showed Dexterity Robotics. The company, which was valued at $1.65 billion last year, builds humanoids to handle “dull, dirty and dangerous” jobs currently performed by humans in warehouses and factories.
Besides Joaquin, Obvious Ventures has four active investors, including co-founder Vishal Vasishth. (Ev Williams remains a co-founder and advisor.) The firm plans to make about 10 investments a year, with check sizes ranging from $5 million to $12 million for startups and Series A.
