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
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
Matt Boldy, Wild make big statement, rout Stars in series opener
Gavin Williams fans 11 in gem as Guardians stifle O's
