Obvious Ventures Raises $360M Fifth Fund: Is Impact Investing Finally Mature?

Raising a fifth venture fund is no small feat. According to research from Sapphire Partners, only 17% of VC firms successfully raise more than three funds. Yet Obvious Ventures, co-founded by Twitter's Evan Williams, just closed its fifth fund at exactly $360,360,360—a number that's far from random.

The firm has made mathematical fund sizes its signature. The first was $123,456,789, followed by the palindromic $191,919,191, then $271,828,182 (Euler's number), and the fourth at $355,111,553 (another palindrome). But this latest figure represents something deeper than numerical playfulness.

"We love the metaphor of taking a 360-degree view," explains James Joaquin, the firm's co-founder and managing director. The number reflects the firm's comprehensive approach to its three investment pillars: planetary health, human health, and economic health. "You have to be a student of the past to understand what's worked and what hasn't worked."

Small Funds, Big Returns Strategy

What's working for Obvious Ventures is keeping fund sizes deliberately modest. Joaquin's philosophy: ensure that a single investment, if it becomes a durable public company, can return the entire fund. This approach stems partly from lessons learned with Beyond Meat, which soared to over $14 billion in market cap after its 2019 IPO before crashing below $1 billion by late 2022.

Despite such volatility, the firm boasts meaningful cash distributions to limited partners across all core funds. Planet Labs, a satellite imagery company they backed in 2015, went public via SPAC in 2021 and currently trades at approximately $8.5 billion. Their Series A investment in Recursion Pharmaceuticals maintains a market cap exceeding $2 billion.

The firm's portfolio also includes Gusto, the HR and payroll platform valued at over $9 billion in private markets and widely considered IPO-ready. With approximately 10 investments annually and check sizes ranging from $5-12 million for Seed and Series A startups, Obvious Ventures has carved out a distinctive niche.

Impact Meets Innovation

The firm's recent investments showcase how impact and cutting-edge technology converge. In planetary health, they've backed Zanskar, which uses proprietary data and AI to identify geothermal energy sources. The company just announced a $115 million Series C, with Joaquin noting that geothermal power could fuel energy-hungry AI data centers.

For human health, they invested in Inceptive, an AI platform for molecule development founded by Jakob Uszkoreit, one of the primary authors of the seminal "Attention is All You Need" paper that introduced transformer architecture—the breakthrough behind generative AI.

In economic health, Dexterity Robotics builds humanoids for "dull, dirty, and dangerous" warehouse and factory tasks. The company reached a $1.65 billion valuation last year, demonstrating how automation can address labor shortages while improving working conditions.

The Maturation of Impact Investing

What makes Obvious Ventures' approach notable isn't just the mathematical fund names or impact focus—it's the proof that purpose-driven investing can generate substantial returns. In an environment where many ESG-focused funds struggled with performance, this firm has consistently delivered.

The timing of their fifth fund is particularly significant. As ESG investing faces backlash and "woke capitalism" criticism grows, Obvious Ventures demonstrates that impact investing can transcend political trends when grounded in solid fundamentals and market opportunities.