Obvious Ventures, a company he co-founded with Twitter Evan Williamshas raised the fifth fund, and this, like the previous one, comes with a “fun” number: $360,360,360.
“We invest in the boundaries of math and science and physics, and we like to celebrate math in our funding numbers as well,” James Joaquin (pictured far right), co-founder of the company and managing director, told TechCrunch.
The company’s first fund was $123,456,789, and the second was $191,919,191 (palindromic numbers that read the same forward and backward). The third is $271,828,182 (which mathematicians and engineers immediately recognize as e, or Euler’s number), while the fourth fund, announced in the middle of 2022, continues the tradition as another palindrome at $355,111,553.
If you haven’t guessed by now, that means Obvious Ventures’ latest fund size is less about geeky math and more about the company’s investment philosophy. Twelve years on, Obvious says the figure reflects a full-circle perspective on three key focuses: planetary health, human health, and economic health.
“We like the metaphor of taking a 360-degree view of each of these areas,” Joaquin said. “You have to be a student of the past to know what worked and what didn’t.”
What works for these companies, according to Joaquin, is keeping the size of the fund small enough so that a single investment, if it becomes a long-lasting public company, has a chance to return the entire fund. Joaquin likely placed an emphasis on sustainability in part because Obvious Venture’s early winner, Beyond Meat, reached a market capitalization of more than $14 billion shortly after the 2019 IPO, but has dropped to less than a billion the end of 2022.
However, Joaquin said the firm has seen meaningful cash distributions to limited partners from all of its core funds, and has had several companies successfully exit the public market. In 2015, Obvious Ventures invested in the satellite imagery company Planet Labs, which went public through a SPAC in 2021 and is currently valued at around $8.5 billion. Meanwhile, its Series A investment in Recursion Pharmaceuticals keeps its market capitalization above $2 billion.
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It is also an early investor in Gusto’s HR and payroll platform, the latter of which is valued at more than $9 billion in the private market and is widely considered to be on the IPO trajectory.
In the venture capital environment where only 17% of the company successfully raising more than three funds, according to research from Sapphire Partners, Obvious Ventures’ latest fundraising solidifies the firm as an established VC player.
“We made it for five funds, which is actually a big deal in the business landscape,” Joaquin said.
Obvious Ventures may take a playful approach to fund size, but it focuses on investing in startups that create positive impact in the serious world. Joaquin pointed to several investments in each of the company’s three pillars.
In the planetary health sector, the company invested in Zanskar, a startup that uses proprietary data and AI to identify and harness geothermal energy, one of the most valuable resources available. Just last week, Zanskar announced a $115 million Series C. Obvious Ventures, which led the company’s previous round, is enthusiastic about the investment. Joaquin noted that the geothermal power used by Zanskar could help power-hungry AI data centers.
In its human health strategy, Obvious Ventures announced its investment in Inceptive, an AI platform for molecular development. Inceptive was founded by Jakob Uszkoreit, one of the main authors of the paper “Attention is All You Need”, which introduced the transformer architecture, the breakthrough behind generative AI.
In terms of economic health, Joaquin pointed to Dexterity Robotics. The company, which is in $1.65 billion years ago, building humanoids to handle the “dull, dirty, and dangerous” job 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 advisor.) The company plans to make about 10 investments a year, with check sizes ranging from $5 million to $12 million for Seed and Series A startups.