Obvious Ventures countries offer five funds and a 360-degree view of the planet, people, financial health

Obvious Ventures, a company founded by Twitter’s Evan Williamshas raised its fifth fund, and this one, like its predecessors, comes with an “exciting” number: $360,360,360.

“We invest in the boundaries of math and science and physics, and we also like to celebrate math in our books,” James Joaquin (pictured right), the company’s co-founder and managing director, told TechCrunch.

The company’s first investment was $123,456,789, and its second was $191,919,191 (a palindromic number that reads the same forward and backward). The third was $271,828,182 (which mathematicians and engineers immediately recognize as e, or Euler’s number), while the fourth fund, announced within 2022, continued the tradition as another palindrome at $355,111,553.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, Obvious Ventures’ definition of a new fund size is less about geeky math and more about investment philosophy. Twelve years into its journey, Obvious says this number represents all three areas of focus: planetary health, human health, and economic health.

“We love the 360-degree look at every stage,” Joaquin said. “You have to be a former student to understand what has worked and what hasn’t.”

What works for this company, according to Joaquin, is to keep the size of the fund so that one fund, if it becomes a stable company, has the opportunity to return all the money. Joaquin may have emphasized durability in part because the Obvious Venture’s first winner, Beyond Meat, earned the most money in the market. $14 billion shortly after its 2019 IPO, but it dropped to a billion at the end of 2022.

However, Joaquin says the firm has seen a healthy distribution of funds to its minority partners from all of its major funds, and has several companies that have successfully exited the market. In 2015, Obvious Ventures invested in satellite imaging company Planet Labs, which went public through a SPAC in 2021 and is currently valued at approximately $8.5 billion. Currently, its Series A investment in Recursion Pharmaceuticals has a market capitalization of over $2 billion.

He is apparently also a founding investor in the HR and payroll platform Gusto, which was recently valued at more than $9 billion in the private market and many are considered to be on the path to an IPO.

In a venture capital environment only 17% of companies successfully raising more than three funds, per research from Sapphire Partners, Obvious Ventures’ latest investment solidifies the company as a sustainable VC player.

“We managed to get five coins, which is a very difficult job,” said Joaquin.

Open Ventures can take an interesting approach to fundraising, but the goal is to invest in the startups that make it good results on the world is serious. Joaquin pointed to several investments in the company’s three pillars.

Within the planetary health sector, the company invested in Zanskar, a start-up using proprietary data and AI to identify and use renewable energy, one of the cheapest forms of energy available. Last week, Zanskar announced a $115 million Series C. Obvious Ventures, which led the company’s previous round, is very excited about the funding. Joaquin noted that the geothermal energy harnessed by Zanskar could support AI-starved areas.

In its public health strategy, Obvious Ventures announced its investment in Inceptive, an AI platform for molecular design. Inceptive was founded by Jakob Uszkoreit, one of the first authors of the paper “Attention is All You Need”, which led to the design of the transformer, the success of AI output.

For financial health, Joaquin pointed to Dexterity Robotics. The company, which was $1.65 billion last year, they built humanoids to do the “useless, dirty, and dangerous” jobs currently done by humans in warehouses and factories.

In addition to Joaquin, Obvious Ventures has four active investors, including co-founder Vishal Vasishth. (Ev Williams is still a founder and advisor.) The company aims to make about 10 times a year, with check sizes ranging from $5 million to $12 million for Seed and Series A startups.