Obvious Ventures

Software engineers are seeing 10X productivity gains from AI. But in healthcare, half of healthcare workers using AI say its saved them no time at all. @JoinIncredible published 7th Annual State of Nursing Report, highlighting the top workforce priorities in healthcare today: the AI gap and Retention gap incrediblehealth.com/blog/the-workf…

Very excited to be backing @exnx, @MichaelPoli6, @athmsx and @Massastrello in their mission to build Radical Numerics into the leading AI research lab with a dual mandate across human health + bio-defense. Fortune just broke the story: fortune.com/2026/06/15/exc…

Together with my co-founders Michael @MichaelPoli6, Stefano @Massastrello and Armin @athmsx, I am excited to announce @RadicalNumerics is emerging from stealth with a $50M seed round to build general biological intelligence. We’re also sharing an early preview of our new model Omnii, the most powerful genome language model to date. Omnii preview link: radicalnumerics.ai/blog/radical-n… At Radical Numerics, our mission is to master the code of life, and to drive the frontier of biological AI for both design and defense. This is our dual mandate, which comes from something our own team helped make possible. Our founding team trained Evo and Evo 2, the largest biological AI models (40B params) trained on DNA sequences. Trillions of tokens across all of life, from microbes to mammals. It’s fully open source, and created the field now known as generative genomics. Last year, scientists used Evo to generate the world’s first complete genome from scratch using AI. Turns out it was a bacteriophage—a type of virus. It functioned in the real world, and in this case it was harmless. But for us, it was a clear turning point. It showed that AI is no longer just analyzing biology. It is on the cusp of generating functional lifeforms. Eventually, AI will have the power to design and control life itself. That should make all of us incredibly excited, and incredibly uneasy. (Anyone can design DNA with a new function, and have it synthesized and delivered, like something from Amazon Prime). The same technology that will help us cure cancer is the very technology that might create the next global pandemic, or worse, allow the creation of bioweapons that can wipe out populations. We believe these forces are inseparable. If you work on the frontier of biology, you have to build technology to safeguard it from its misuse. Existing biosecurity tools are sorely losing the arms race, relying on outdated “have I seen this exact thing before?” style algorithms. We founded Radical Numerics to turn the tide. And we can’t do that by training on textbooks and natural language. We must understand the language of biology from the raw physical data itself, to reason across every molecule and modality, from DNA to proteins. The next frontier for AI goes far beyond chatbots or video generators to models that can understand and engineer life. Today, we’re previewing Omnii, which is already far surpassing Evo 2, and will continue improving as we scale and add new modalities (training now). 1. For human health, Omnii can read and write whole genomes (more on writing later). It’s state of the art (SOTA) on detecting causal variants for disease, and can rank Alzheimer's mutations zero-shot. We’re partnering with a diagnostics company to use Omnii for early cancer detection (pancreatic and multi-cancer). 2. For defense, Omnii is SOTA at detecting AI-generated pathogens. We benchmarked existing detection tools, and they simply can’t detect the AI-generated ones (“deepfake viruses”). We’re partnering with a US national lab to pilot Omnii for detecting the next pandemic, both natural and AI-generated. We have a data center full of Blackwells in construction now to build the most powerful biological AI models ever. This mission takes a new kind of AI lab that can actually scale on physical, biological data: new alignment research (mid/post training), scaling long context, building out mech interp teams to dissect what these models learn, new architectures and systems designs, all from the ground up. Our team is made up of AI researchers and scientists from top labs and institutions (e.g. Stanford, MIT, Google DeepMind), but more importantly, we all share the belief that this is the most important challenge of our lifetime. If you feel similarly, we are hiring. We aim to bring the brightest minds in AI and science together to save lives. Thanks to our partners on this journey, led by Emergence Capital @emergencecap, with Obvious Ventures @obviousvc, Triatomic @TriatomicCap , and Patrick Collison @patrickc. Our advisors include Eric Horvitz @erichorvitz, CSO of Microsoft, Chris Re @HazyResearch of Stanford, George Church @geochurch of Harvard, and Andrew Weber @AndyWeberNCB, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Defense Programs. Fortune article: fortune.com/2026/06/15/exc… Jobs: radicalnumerics.ai/join-us

"Jakob proposed replacing RNNs with self-attention and started the effort to evaluate this idea." This footnote in the seminal - perhaps by now historical - "Attention Is All You Need" paper quietly captures how counter-intuitive ideas take root and go on to reshape entire fields. The Transformer architecture it introduced became the technical foundation for the current mega-cycle in AI. A few years later, @kyosu had a similar seemingly heretical but consequential idea - this time in biology. Rather than joining the consensus paradigm of building AI models around protein structure prediction, he asked: what if sequence is all you need? Could one build foundation models that go directly from sequence to biological function? This is the core premise behind @InceptiveCom . Today, Inceptive entered a landmark partnership with @Alnylam ($ALNY) to take this further and unlock innovative oligonucleotide designs at scale. This is an up to $2B deal that includes cash, near-term economics, milestones, and an equity investment. Alnylam is admired in biotech circles for their determination that built a leading platform company around a new therapeutic modality. Over more than two decades, the company expanded on Nobel Prize-winning science to pioneer the category of RNA interference, also known as gene silencing. Fast forward to today, Alnylam has multiple first-in-class approved therapies, generated several billions in revenue, is rapidly growing and profitable, and carries a deep pipeline of novel medicines. To us, this partnership represents the best of AI x biology: deep technical and scientific expertise, united by a joint and novel vision that fuels the relentless pursuit of developing innovative and life-saving therapies for patients. Congratulations to both teams - and best of luck. businesswire.com/news/home/2026…

We raised $40M to make AI safe enough to trust. 🦢 Co-led by @WingVC and @MadronaVentures, with @Obviousvc, @Snowflake, @WeAreHRT, @SamsungNext, and @magaracvc. More fuel to deliver on the mission: empowering the world to use AI safely and securely. hubs.ly/Q04jdyhp0

I'm thrilled to announce a new adventure: I'm joining @obviousvc as a Partner to lead deep tech and frontier AI investments! We're living through an extraordinary renaissance at the frontier — one that will redefine technology and humanity for decades to come. Looking forward to partner with @VishalVasishth @andrewbeebe @jamesjoaquin @certifiedrohan @kahinish and the entire team. Grateful for all my @DFJvc @dfjgrowth and @thresholdvc colleagues and founders. Excited for what's to come!

Eka means unity -- “one,” in Sanskrit and “first” in Finnish. We’re building intelligence for the physical world in its native language: forces. Until now, robotics faced a tradeoff — generality or speed. The real world requires both. Robotics also faced a data problem. Our Vision–Force–Action (VFA) model — the first of its kind — breaks the generality-speed tradeoff and the data barrier. It's a new foundation uniting performance, generality, and safety for putting capable robots in everyone's hands. Today, I am excited to share our journey of pushing robots beyond human limits. Today, dexterity becomes scalable. Today, I welcome you to the Era of Eka. Co-founded with @haarnoja, and so thrilled and grateful to be working with a dream team at @EkaRobotics. Learn more: ekarobotics.com

Today is a Gusto Showcase! It’s one of my favorite moments, when we share a summary of how we’re making Gusto better for our 500,000+ small business customers. At @GustoHQ, we obsess over helping small businesses, and every challenge they face is an opportunity for us to help. Gusto has never been just a tool or technology. We strive to be a partner for small businesses, taking hats off their head, doing work on their behalf, so they can progress in building their business. With 500,000+ customers, we know we’re still early in the journey. There are millions of small businesses we are eager to serve. The future of business is small. And that’s big. #GustoShowcase

🚨 The era of general-purpose AI is over. Today we're launching Oumi. 🚀 The platform that lets any team build custom AI models — in hours, not months. Just describe what you need. Oumi builds it. #VibeML Higher quality. Lower cost. Fully yours.

76% of healthcare leaders say they're not prepared to implement AI at the speed their organizations require. The intent is here. The execution is lagging. @JoinIncredible just launched our 2026 Healthcare Executive Report on AI & the healthcare workforce 👇

some head-turning news! techcrunch.com/2026/01/26/obv…

From small practices to hospitals, the pattern is clear. If scheduling breaks, everything else struggles. Correct bookings protect care quality. Everything depends on that first step.

#Obello raised $8.5M in Seed funding led by StepStone platform manager @obviousvc to scale its AI design platform and expand its GLAM engine, which delivers intelligent, on-brand creative across channels with one-click adaptive design. Continue learning: bit.ly/47L7OyN

We are excited to announce our latest #generativescience investment!

Big news: Inductive has raised a $25M Series A to democratize AI that transforms small molecule drug discovery. Our Compass platform, powered by our pre-competitive data consortium, predicts ADMET properties before synthesis - helping find higher quality drugs for patients, faster. • Backed by @obviousvc, @a16zBioHealth, @Lux_Capital, @S32_VC & more • 1st place in Polaris ADMET challenge • Supporting dozens of active drug programs already We’re just getting started. 👉 inductive.bio/news/inductive… #DrugDiscovery #AI #Biotech #Pharma #InductiveBio

We are proud to support @kyosu and the team at Inceptive. They are building AI models on the languages of biology and computer science, and using them to produce new mRNA therapies and vaccines. obvious.com/ideas/creating…

In 2014, we founded Obvious with the simple idea that venture capital could be a force for positive change. Our next chapter will center on #GenerativeScience and the companies using AI to discover new technologies in climate, healthcare, and robotics. obvious.com/ideas/obvious-…

Generative science is already rewiring every field of science, from physics to biology, with enormous potential for the future of our species and our planet. Our co-founder, @JamesJoaquin, on how it will help us solve the unsolvable. #GenSci