Twitter co-founder Evan Williams speaks during the Web Summit 2018 in Lisbon, Portugal, on Nov. 8, 2018.
Pedro Fiúza | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Obvious Ventures, the venture capital firm co-founded by Twitter’s Evan Williams, has filed to raise $400 million for its latest fund, according to a regulatory filing.
The filing for Obvious Ventures V was made public with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday and indicates that it is an initial notice. The firm raised its most recent fund in 2022, when it brought in about $355 million, according to PitchBook data, short of its $400 million target.
A spokesperson for the firm declined to comment.
Launched in 2014, Obvious Ventures is widely known for its early investment in alternative meat startup Beyond Meat, holding a 9% stake at the time of the company’s initial public offering in 2019. It has been a tough run on the market for Beyond Meat, whose market cap is now below $300 million after peaking at more than $14 billion in the months that followed its market debut.
The venture market broadly has struggled in recent years, with tech IPOs largely drying up in 2022 and staying relatively dormant aside from a few notable deals each year. In the third quarter of 2024, exit value hit a five-quarter low, with “only two exits — both acquisitions — exceeding the billion-dollar threshold,” according to an October report from PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association.
Obvious Ventures says it aims to “support entrepreneurs building disruptive solutions to humanity’s biggest challenges,” with a focus on what it calls planetary health, human health and economic health. Well-known investments include supplements company Olly, lab-grown diamond maker Diamond Foundry and electric bus maker Proterra.
In its early years, Obvious Ventures had fun with numbers in its fundraising. For its first fund in 2015, the firm raised $123,456,789. Its second fund two years later raised the numeric palindrome, $191,919,191.
James Joaquin, who co-founded Obvious with Williams in 2014, said at the time of the second fund that the symbolism of the number was that you could look back at the first fund’s investments for an indication of what the firm would do in the future.
Joaquin, one of the firm’s managing directors, was previously CEO of Xoom, a payments service acquired by PayPal, and Ofoto, which was purchased by Kodak.
Williams, who helped create Twitter and was CEO of the company from 2008 to 2010, is still named as a co-founder of Obvious, but he isn’t a managing director. Williams wrote in a post on his publishing site Medium in 2017 that he was selling up to 30% of his Twitter holdings to finance other projects, including Obvious.
Late last year, Williams launched the app Mozi, which describes itself as a “private social network for seeing your people more” in real life.
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