Obvious Ventures
Obvious Ventures is a San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm founded in 2014 by Ev Williams, James Joaquin, and Vishal Vasishth, investing in entrepreneurs building "world positive" companies that solve humanity's biggest problems through technology. The firm invests across three thesis pillars: planetary health (sustainable energy, food, mobility, climate), human health and longevity (healthcare, biotech, wellness), and economic health (fintech, the future of work, robotics, and inclusive systems). Obvious writes approximately 10 new checks per year, typically $5M to $12M into seed and Series A rounds, deliberately keeping fund sizes small enough that a single durable public company can return an entire fund. It closed its fifth fund at $360,360,360 in early 2026 and has backed 90+ companies since inception, including Beyond Meat, Planet, Gusto, Recursion, Devoted Health, Diamond Foundry, and Proterra. Obvious is a Certified B Corporation headquartered at 190 Pacific Avenue, San Francisco, CA.
Obvious Ventures has 90 portfolio companies tracked on the APIs.io network, of which 15 (17%) publish APIs indexed here. The remaining 75 are tracked as profiles without a published API on the network.
Its highest-rated API providers on the network are Canvas, Lynx, Keyo, Devoted, Medable.
Portfolio on the Network
Portfolio companies that publish APIs indexed on APIs.io, grouped by their API Evangelist rating. Exemplar and Strong are expanded by default.
Exemplar 1 Complete, well-documented, and agent-ready
Properties
Portfolio
Where the firm publishes its investments
Cohort brief
Auto-generatedThe 71 portfolio companies with APIs in the catalog, backed by Obvious Ventures, scored on the Kin Score. Every figure below is computed from the catalog — nothing here is written.
| Facet | This cohort | Catalog | Difference | Scored |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Access Clarity | 22.9 | 26.5 | -3.6 | 71 |
| Contract Governance | 2.9 | 7 | -4.1 | 71 |
| Operational Transparency | 6.6 | 13.2 | -6.6 | 71 |
| Discoverability | 51.3 | 58 | -6.7 | 71 |
| Developer Ergonomics | 14.2 | 23.8 | -9.6 | 71 |
| Contract Quality | 6.7 | 17.7 | -11 | 71 |
A facet is averaged over the members that carry it, not over the whole cohort — the “Scored” column is that count. Averaging an absent facet as zero would score our own coverage gaps as the providers’ posture.
| Artifact | This cohort | Catalog | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| MCP server (any) | 10% | 15% | -5 |
| MCP server (first-party) | 10% | 13% | -3 |
| Agent Skills | 0% | 0% | 0 |
| OAuth scopes | 6% | 12% | -6 |
| Security | 99% | 98% | +1 |
| Arazzo workflows | 1% | 2% | -1 |
| Governance rules | 3% | 18% | -15 |
mcp_pct counts any mcp/ artifact including ones API Evangelist derived from the provider OpenAPI; mcp_first_party_pct counts only servers the provider publishes. Prefer the latter.
- 1 Canvas
- 2 Lynx
- 3 Keyo
- 4 Devoted Health
- 5 Medable
- 6 Sinai Technologies
- 7 VSCO
- 8 Dexterity
- 9 Gusto
- 10 Planet Labs
- 1 Canvas {"score" => 37.6, "band" => "agent-ready"}
- 2 Devoted Health {"score" => 35.7, "band" => "agent-ready"}
- 3 Lynx {"score" => 35.4, "band" => "agent-ready"}
- 4 Gusto {"score" => 31.3, "band" => "agent-ready"}
- 5 Dexterity {"score" => 26.5, "band" => "agent-aware"}
- 6 Sinai Technologies {"score" => 25.3, "band" => "agent-aware"}
- 7 Keyo {"score" => 24.3, "band" => "agent-aware"}
- 8 Planet Labs {"score" => 21.3, "band" => "agent-aware"}
- 9 VSCO {"score" => 19.9, "band" => "agent-aware"}
- 10 All In {"score" => 18.7, "band" => "agent-aware"}
Coverage caveat. 69 of 71 scored members had under half their catalog-attributable points satisfied at all (catalog_earned / catalog_max < 0.5). They are INCLUDED in the mean above. A large share here means the cohort mean is partly a measurement of how far our enrichment reached, not only of how these providers publish.Generated from the catalog build of 2 November 2026, across 37080 providers, using the same computation served by the APIs.io cohort API. Briefs are published for rosters of 5 or more scored providers; below that a distribution is not meaningful.
Source (apis.yml)
Work with this as data
Every firm here is available over the APIs.io API and to AI agents over MCP.