Obvious Ventures Launches Fifth Fund with a Holistic Investment Approach
Obvious Ventures, co-founded by Twitter’s Evan Williams, has announced the closure of its fifth fund, totaling $360,360,360. This unique figure reflects the firm’s commitment to a comprehensive investment strategy encompassing planetary health, human health, and economic health.
The firm’s tradition of selecting distinctive fund sizes continues with this latest fund. Previous funds include:
– First Fund: $123,456,789
– Second Fund: $191,919,191 (a palindromic number)
– Third Fund: $271,828,182 (representing Euler’s number, e)
– Fourth Fund: $355,111,553 (another palindrome)
James Joaquin, co-founder and managing director, explained that the $360 million figure symbolizes a 360-degree view of their investment areas, emphasizing the importance of learning from the past to inform future decisions.
Obvious Ventures maintains a strategy of keeping fund sizes manageable, allowing a single successful investment to potentially return the entire fund. This approach has led to significant returns, with notable public-market exits such as:
– Planet Labs: Invested in 2015, the satellite imagery company went public via a SPAC in 2021 and is currently valued at approximately $8.5 billion.
– Recursion Pharmaceuticals: A Series A investment that now boasts a market capitalization exceeding $2 billion.
The firm has also been an early investor in Gusto, an HR and payroll platform valued at over $9 billion in the private market, indicating a strong trajectory toward an IPO.
In a venture capital landscape where only 17% of firms raise more than three funds, Obvious Ventures’ fifth fund underscores its established presence in the industry. Joaquin highlighted the significance of reaching this milestone, noting that achieving a fifth fund is a notable accomplishment in the venture capital world.
The firm’s investment focus spans three key areas:
1. Planetary Health: Investments include Zanskar, a startup utilizing proprietary data and AI to identify and harness geothermal energy. Zanskar recently announced a $115 million Series C funding round, with Obvious Ventures leading the previous round. The geothermal energy harnessed by Zanskar has the potential to power energy-intensive AI data centers.
2. Human Health: The firm has invested in Inceptive, an AI platform for molecule development founded by Jakob Uszkoreit, a primary author of the influential Attention Is All You Need paper that introduced the transformer architecture behind generative AI.
3. Economic Health: Obvious Ventures has backed Dexterity Robotics, a company building humanoid robots designed to perform dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks in warehouses and factories. Dexterity Robotics was valued at $1.65 billion last year.
The investment team at Obvious Ventures includes co-founder Vishal Vasishth, with Evan Williams serving as a co-founder and adviser. The firm plans to make approximately 10 investments annually, with initial check sizes ranging from $5 million to $12 million for seed and Series A startups.
