Tech
Obvious Ventures lands fund five with a 360-degree view of planetary, human, economic health
Obvious Ventures, the firm co-founded by Twitter’s Evan Williams, has raised a fifth fund, and this one, just like its predecessors, comes with a “fun” number: $360,360,360.
“We invest in the frontiers of math and science and physics, and we like to celebrate math in our fund numbers as well,” James Joaquin (pictured far right), the firm’s co-founder and managing director, told TechCrunch.
The firm’s first fund was $123,456,789, and the second was $191,919,191 (a palindromic number that reads the same forward and backwards). The third was $271,828,182 (which mathematicians and engineers instantly recognize as e, or Euler’s number), while the fourth fund, announced in mid-2022, continued the tradition as another palindrome at $355,111,553.
If you haven’t guessed it by now, the meaning of Obvious Ventures’ newest fund size is a little less about geeky math and more about the firm’s investing philosophy. Twelve years into its journey, Obvious says the figure represents a full-circle perspective on its three broad focus areas: planetary health, human health, and economic health.
“We love the metaphor of taking a 360-degree view in each of those areas,” Joaquin said. “You have to be a student of the past to understand what’s worked and what hasn’t worked.”
What’s working for the firm, according to Joaquin, is keeping its fund sizes small enough so that a single investment, if it becomes a durable public company, has the opportunity to return the entire fund. Joaquin likely placed an emphasis on durability in part because one of Obvious Ventures’ initial winners, Beyond Meat, reached a market capitalization of over $14 billion shortly after its 2019 IPO, but had fallen to below a billion by late 2022.
Still, Joaquin says the firm has seen meaningful cash distributions to limited partners from all of its core funds, and it boasts several companies with successful public-market exits. In 2015, Obvious Ventures invested in the satellite imagery company Planet Labs, which went public via a SPAC in 2021 and is currently valued at approximately $8.5 billion. Meanwhile, its Series A investment in Recursion Pharmaceuticals maintains a market capitalization of over $2 billion.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
October 13-15, 2026
Obvious is also an early investor in the HR and payroll platform Gusto, which was most recently valued at more than $9 billion in the private market and is widely considered to be on an IPO trajectory.
In a venture capital environment where only 17% of firms successfully raise more than three funds, per research from Sapphire Partners, Obvious Ventures’ latest fundraise solidifies the firm as an established VC player.
“We made it to fund five, which is actually a big deal in the venture landscape,” Joaquin said.
Obvious Ventures may take a playful approach to fund sizes, but its focus on investing in startups that make a positive impact on the world is serious. Joaquin pointed to several investments in each of the firm’s three pillars.
Within the planetary health sector, the firm invested in Zanskar, a startup using proprietary data and AI to identify and harness geothermal energy, one of the most cost-effective power sources available. Just last week, Zanskar announced a $115 million Series C. Obvious Ventures, which led the company’s previous round, is particularly excited about the investment. Joaquin noted that the geothermal power harnessed by Zanskar can help fuel energy-hungry AI data centers.
In its human health strategy, Obvious Ventures touted its investment in Inceptive, an AI platform for molecule development. Inceptive was founded by Jakob Uszkoreit, one of the primary authors of the seminal “Attention Is All You Need” paper, which introduced the transformer architecture, the breakthrough behind generative AI.
In the area of economic health, Joaquin pointed to Dexterity Robotics. The company, which was valued at $1.65 billion last year, builds humanoids to handle “dull, dirty, and dangerous” tasks currently performed by humans in warehouses and factories.
In addition to Joaquin, Obvious Ventures has four active investors, including co-founder Vishal Vasishth. (Ev Williams remains a co-founder and an adviser.) The firm intends to make approximately 10 investments annually, with check sizes ranging from $5 million to $12 million for seed and Series A startups.
Tech
Revolut eyes valuation of up to $200B in eventual IPO
British neobank Revolut seems to be eyeing a major valuation bump when it eventually goes public. The company is targeting a market cap between $150 billion and $200 billion in an initial public offering, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous investor sources.
The fintech giant, which secured a full banking license in the United Kingdom in March after years of waiting, was most recently valued at $75 billion, up from $45 billion in 2024, in a secondary share sale that made it one of Europe’s most valuable private tech companies.
Revolut’s co-founder and CEO, Nik Storonsky, last week said that the company’s IPO was at least “two years away,” according to Bloomberg.
According to PitchBook and the Financial Times, the company is working on another secondary share sale, scheduled for the second half of 2026, that would value it at more than $100 billion.
As of November 2025, the company had raised a total of $5.89 billion, according to PitchBook. Revolut reported revenue of $6 billion in the financial year ended December 31, 2025, up from $4 billion in 2024. The company’s net profit grew to $1.7 billion, up from $1 billion in 2024, and counted 68.3 million retail customers at the end of 2025.
Revolut declined to comment.
Founded in 2015, Revolut offers a range of services spanning multi-currency accounts, payment and transfer services, crypto products, insurance, and more. The neobank has been pouring truckloads of cash into expanding its operations internationally, and recently applied for a banking license in the United States.
Besides the U.K., Revolut has a banking license in the European Union, and it operates in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, and the U.S. Revolut launched operations in India last October, is about to start operating in Colombia this year, and has received a banking license in Mexico.
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
Amazon taps Sweden’s Einride for its electric big rigs
Einride is adding 75 of its electric heavy duty trucks to Amazon’s Relay freight network as part of a deal that gives the Swedish startup a toehold in the e-commerce giant’s operations. Einride will also provide charging infrastructure across five locations in the United States, under the agreement announced Tuesday.
Amazon isn’t buying or operating the electric trucks. Instead, Einride will own and manage (using its own Saga AI software) the trucks, which can be used by drivers in Amazon’s Relay freight network. Relay, launched in 2017, is an app that truck drivers can use to book hauling gigs with Amazon.
Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli, who took over as chief nearly a year ago, said working with Amazon is a powerful validation of the startup’s technology and strategic vision.
“By deploying our intelligent platform within one of the world’s most sophisticated logistics networks, we are accelerating growth, while continuing to build industry-leading operational expertise,” he said in a statement.
Einride has gained attention and investment for its two-pronged approach to freight. The company has developed and now operates a fleet of about 200 heavy-duty electric trucks for companies like Heineken, PepsiCo, and Carlsberg Sweden in Europe, North America, and the UAE. It has also developed autonomous pod-like trucks, which stand out for their cab-less design.
The agreement with Amazon doesn’t include the autonomous pods.
Einride has landed this agreement at a critical time: The startup is finalizing a merger with blank-check company Legato Merger Corp. and is expected to go public soon.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
While the agreement might not carry the same weight for Amazon, which has a market cap of $2.7 trillion, it does contribute to its low-carbon goals. Amazon has said it wants to reach net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2040.
“This rollout is an important step forward in addressing one of the toughest challenges we face in decarbonizing our transportation network — electrifying heavy-duty trucking,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We’re excited to continue to collaborate with Einride and learn from these operations as the trucks hit the road.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
Tech
YouTube expands its AI likeness detection technology to celebrities
YouTube is expanding its new “likeness detection” technology, which identifies AI-generated content, such as deepfakes, to people within the entertainment industry, the company announced on Tuesday.
The technology works similarly to YouTube’s existing Content ID system, which detects copyright-protected material in users’ uploaded videos, allowing rights owners to request removal or share in the video’s revenue.
Likeness detection does the same, but for simulated faces. The feature is meant to help protect creators and other public figures from having their identities used without their permission — a common problem for celebrities who find their likenesses have been used in scam advertisements.
The technology was first made available to a subset of YouTube creators in a pilot program last year before expanding more broadly to include politicians, government officials, and journalists this spring.
Now YouTube says the technology is being made available to those in the entertainment industry, including talent agencies, management companies, and the celebrities they represent. The company has support from major agencies like CAA, UTA, WME, and Untitled Management, which offered feedback on the new tool.
Use of the likeness detection tool does not require entertainers to have their own YouTube channels.
Instead, the feature scans for AI-generated content to detect visual matches of an enrolled participant’s face. Users can then choose to request removal of the video for privacy policy violations, submit a copyright removal request, or do nothing. YouTube notes that it won’t remove all content, as it permits parody and satire content under its rules.
In the future, the technology will support audio as well, the company says.
Related to this, YouTube has also been advocating for similar protections at a federal level, with its support for the NO FAKES Act in Washington, D.C. This would regulate the use of AI to create unauthorized re-creations of an individual’s voice and visual likeness.
The company hasn’t yet said how many removals of AI deepfakes have been managed by the tool so far, but noted in March that the amount of removals was still “very small.”
When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
The new Dyson Supersonic Travel is the cheapest Supersonic yet
The gorgeous yet budget-friendly Samsung QN70F Neo QLED TV is the cheapest its ever been
