Obvious Ventures was founded in December 2014 by Twitter and Medium co-founder Ev Williams, alongside James Joaquin (former CEO of Xoom and Ofoto) and Vishal Vasishth, built on a genuinely non-obvious premise for the time: that companies solving humanity's biggest problems profitably, not as charity, would become the most valuable businesses of the coming decades. Organizing its investing around three pillars - planetary health, human health, and economic health - Obvious made early bets on Beyond Meat, Planet Labs, and Recursion Pharmaceuticals years before any of them were obvious winners, and has playfully closed its five funds at mathematically meaningful numbers, from $123,456,789 to Euler's number, $271,828,182, to its 2026 fifth fund at $360,360,360. The firm has backed more than 100 companies since founding, reaching $1.6 billion in cumulative AUM.
Beyond Meat's May 2019 NASDAQ IPO at a roughly $14 billion peak market cap - Obvious held a 9% stake at the time, one of several public outcomes alongside Planet Labs' 2021 SPAC listing and Recursion Pharmaceuticals' NASDAQ IPO