Obvious Ventures

Every company has a story to tell. Yet that goal is increasingly hard to achieve in a world of fragmented media channels. Marketing a brand now requires companies to span dozens of formats, languages, platforms, and devices. The result is often a creative bottleneck that forces teams to choose: Do we keep tight control of our brand identity and limit our reach, or do we decentralize design and risk diluting our voice and consistency? Obello was purpose-built to solve this tension.

A few years ago, Jakob Uszkoreit had a realization. Uszkoreit was one of the eight Google researchers who laid the foundations for the field of generative AI in their groundbreaking 2017 paper Attention is All You Need. In the paper, the authors described a novel machine learning model architecture called Transformer that was later used in popular applications including OpenAI’s Chat-GPT. After their breakthrough, all eight authors left Google to work on new ventures built upon this technology.

In 2014, we founded Obvious with the simple idea that the most valuable companies of our time would be the ones solving humanity’s biggest problems. We set out to invest across three huge surface areas: planetary health, human health, and economic health. These were broad by design, enabling a diverse portfolio across disparate industries, and huge in their potential for world positive impact.

Four years ago, Praveen Kalamegham met his friend Frank Licea for dinner at a trendy Japanese restaurant in downtown Austin. Over sushi, the conversation turned to work. Kalamegham, a CTO, was struggling to hire engineers even though his startup, Workrise, had just secured $300 million in funding. “Unless you were a FAANG company, you couldn’t even get into conversations with experienced software engineers,” Kalamegham recalls of the intense competition for engineering talent at the time.

The world is waking up to a powerful fact about the future: We need substantially more energy than anyone thought, and we need it soon. For the past two decades, energy demand has been mostly flat, growing roughly two percent per year. But three forces are driving demand to spike: compute for AI and Crypto, reshoring of manufacturing, and the electrification of everything. Utilities in the U.S. now forecast that they’ll need to double or even triple production by 2040. This is only the beginning.

By Kahini Shah and James Joaquin A copilot, according to Merriam-Webster, is a “qualified pilot who assists or relieves the pilot but is not in command.” This word is a great metaphor for the new wave of AI software applications designed to give humans superpowers in the workplace. At Obvious, we see AI as ushering in a major transformation to how we find and do our best work.

On a frigid evening in February 2023, after a cold snap hit Burlington, Vermont, and the temperature plummeted to 20 below zero, two bright yellow electric school buses parked at a school bus depot did something unusual. With the press of a button, they quietly began dispensing energy from their batteries back through their chargers to the electrical grid.

Just past the entrance of the research and development headquarters of Lightship, in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood, to the left of the workshop where the engineers gather to test new drive trains and eclectic water heaters, there’s a small red frame that hints at the humble origins of this startup that is building America’s first all-electric travel trailer. It all began, the framed story explains, with an electric waffle maker.

Nearly a decade ago, we founded Obvious Ventures to invest in companies solving the biggest, most complex problems of our time. These problems include the climate crisis, financial insecurity, and chronic disease. Together they are like a vast, intricate puzzle. We are working to solve it by decoding the connections among social, environmental, and economic factors, and investing in the most scalable solutions.

In our latest World Positive Report, you'll discover how our portfolio companies are creating new solutions to humanity's most significant challenges, and building a better world, one piece of the puzzle at a time. Obvious invests in category-defining companies addressing humanity’s biggest challenges. In this World Positive Report, we capture and report on our portfolio companies’ far-reaching impact across three investment pillars: Sustainable Systems, Healthy Living, and People Power.