- Obvious Ventures announced recently that it is setting up its third fund at $271,828,182.
Obvious Ventures — a venture capital firm founded by Medium CEO and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, James Joaquin and Vishal Vasishth — recently closed its third fund at $271,828,182.
You may be wondering… why $271,828,182?
“It’s a nod to one of the most important constants in mathematics: Euler’s Number, universally known as e,” wrote Joaquin in a blog post on Medium. “The number e (2.71828182…) is the limit of (1 + 1/n)ⁿ as n approaches infinity. You may have learned about it studying compounding interest or calculus. It’s named e after Leonhard Euler (pronounced “Oiler”), who is downright legendary in mathematics.”
Obvious Ventures will be using this fund to continue to invest in early-stage impactful companies. The firm’s previous two funds had closed at $123,456,789 and $191,919,191, respectively
Last year, Obvious saw its first portfolio exits, including the IPO of Beyond Meat. And the firm pointed out that it is targeting investments in categories such as human health and environmental benefits. And Beyond Meat is a proof point that using innovation to disrupt a trillion-dollar industry (animal protein) can create billions in market value.
“When the fund first started, we did get a lot of people coming to us thinking of us as a social impact fund,” said Obvious Ventures managing director Andrew Beebe in an interview with Crunchbase News back in March 2019. “We would get pitches for yoga mat cleaners, or people selling a lot of used clothing and putting it into a business model that just reeked of first-world hubris… But that’s not the kind of stuff we wanted to invest in.”
