Our portfolio company @VincereBio just received a $2.7 million SBIR Phase II award from the NIH's NIDDK to advance its USP30 inhibitor through IND-enabling studies for acute kidney injury. AKI affects over 13 million people worldwide each year, and no approved therapy directly modifies the disease. Vincere's approach clears damaged mitochondria from injured kidney tissue so it can recover. This is Vincere's second organ from the same platform: their lead program, backed by a $5 million award from The Michael J. Fox Foundation, is advancing toward the clinic for Parkinson's. Over $8 million in non-dilutive funding from the NIH and MJFF now validates the science. Congratulations to @Dr_Behrouz, @andy_d_lee, and the Vincere team. 🤝

We published an article on how we built our own AI infrastructure at Draper to automate every routine task and give our team more time to do the human work in VC. Two years ago, our firm ran on eight Excel sheets. Today, one auto-updated base runs everything: 400+ portfolio companies, 15,000+ contacts, 1,900+ meeting notes, searchable in plain English from a phone. We published the full build log, the 5 decisions we made before building anything matter more than any tool: • Decide where the data lives first. One base, one record per company. Everything else feeds it or builds on it. • Build on infrastructure you already own. Airtable, Zapier, Claude. No new vendors. Fixing something means editing a prompt, not shipping a deploy. • Customize the judgment. An off-the-shelf lead scorer doesn't know your thesis or your passes. • When the system isn't sure, it stops and asks a human. No guessing where the data has to be right. • Document every tool like a shipped product, so the next person picks it up in five minutes. The biggest payoff is the hours it returns to the work only people can do: sitting with a founder, getting to know them deeply, and making the call. Read the whole blog on how we built Draper’s AI stack in the comments.

Our portfolio company Vincere Biosciences just received a $2.7 million NIH SBIR Phase II award to advance its USP30 inhibitor through IND-enabling studies for AKI. Over 13 million people suffer acute kidney injury every year. Zero approved therapies directly modify the disease. In severe cases, 90-day mortality approaches 40%. That combination, enormous burden and empty treatment landscape, is exactly where we want our founders working. Vincere started in Parkinson's, where a $5 million Michael J. Fox Foundation award is carrying their lead program toward clinical trials. The kidney program is the same platform following the data into a second organ. When a team builds on mechanism rather than indication, every new dataset opens another door. Non-dilutive validation from the NIH and MJFF, two programs advancing toward the clinic, and a founding team still following the science wherever it leads. Congratulations to the Vincere team. 🤝

We’re excited to announce that our portfolio company Cloverleaf Bio just closed a $33 million seed round. We’re proud to be backing the team for the first time alongside an incredible group of investors. @4biocapital, @AbbVie Ventures, @EliLillyandCo, and @Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, @MissionBioCap, and BrightEdge - American Cancer Society. Cloverleaf is a great example of what we look for in Bio-Cure: root-cause science aimed at developing fundamentally better ways to treat disease. The company is building engineered transfer RNA payloads that go after enzymes cancer cells become abnormally dependent on as they proliferate. In preclinical studies, their lead compound stayed active in cancer cell lines resistant to frontline chemotherapy and current-generation ADC payloads, and outperformed standard of care in liver and lung cancer models at substantially lower doses. A Yale spinout, built on foundational science funded by the National Cancer Institute, attacking a mechanism the field took for granted for sixty years. Congratulations to Austin Draycott, Cole Lewis, Wendy Gilbert, and the whole Cloverleaf team. We’re thrilled to be on this journey together! 🤝

Our portfolio company @poseidonaero just closed a $60M Series A, led by @TQVentures. We backed them early and doubled down in this round. Autonomous cargo planes, designed and built from the ground up. Air logistics is one of those categories that sounds too hard until someone builds it, and this team is building it. Congratulations to the Poseidon crew. 🤝

Radiant just landed a $750 million contract from the U.S. Army to deliver 15 Kaleidos microreactors, one of the largest contracts the Defense Innovation Unit has issued to date. Five years ago this was a pitch deck. We and @BoostVC backed it when portable nuclear power sounded like science fiction. Now the Army is deploying it across multiple installations, and the operational data from those deployments will accelerate commercial reactors worldwide. Congratulations to the @RadiantNuclear team. 🤝

Link: piped.video/watch?v=UmsXdWSO…

@AlefAeronautics started test production on the first flying car set for customer delivery within 12 months. Three more updates worth knowing: → Alef signed a Search and Rescue agreement with the world's largest fully volunteer EMS organization, which responds to more than 730,000 emergencies a year. Their flying cars will help save lives and not just skip traffic. → The team hit a 200lb payload lift in flight. → Alef opened its Series A and walked away with 5 term sheets. We backed @jimdukhovny and this team back in 2022, when "flying car" still sounded like science fiction to most investors, but Jim has never once treated it that way. He's building road infrastructure compatibility into a vertical takeoff aircraft, which is a much harder problem than either flying or driving alone. The founders who get dismissed early are usually the ones building the thing everyone else said was impossible. Alef just proved it's not impossible. It's on a production line.

ionetworks.co just became a @RedHat Certified Software Partner. They’re one of the only companies in Asia-Pacific to earn that status in Vision AI. Their flagship system, AIONXIS, is now live for enterprise and government buyers worldwide to find and deploy. Governments and enterprises are done outsourcing their data. They want AI that runs on their own servers, under their own rules, with a full paper trail on the software underneath it. That's becoming a hard requirement for anyone selling into defense, semiconductors, or critical infrastructure. AIONXIS is built for exactly that. It runs deep on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift AI meaning that it gives customers a trust architecture. Over 90% of the Fortune 500 already run on Red Hat’s stack. Within 60 days of certification, AIONXIS landed inside a top 5 global IC design company, a major Japanese cross-border conglomerate, and national defense and government security agencies. Every enterprise AI company hits the same wall eventually where the tech works, but the compliance and security review takes forever. Riding on Red Hat's certification cuts that review time down, because the trust work is already done at the infrastructure layer. Congratulations to the ioNetworks team!

@pauljzak built the field of neuroeconomics. For years his science lived in labs, translating oxytocin and dopamine signals into a read on what a brain actually values, second by second. Now it fits in a carrying case. ImmersionLive ships with 30 or 64 wearables. Wave one over an iPad, hand it to a guest, and every second of their event gets scored for two things: how much their brain valued that moment, and how safe and regulated they felt while it happened. No surveys or facial cameras or guessing based on what people say when you ask them how the night went. Or worse… three days afterwards when they’ve forgotten most of it. That gap matters more than most companies think. 80% of live events miss their revenue goals. 85% shut down within a year. Human memory only holds onto the peak moment and the ending, so every NPS score and post-event survey is really just a question about two data points dressed up as the thing. Paul co-founded the field of neuroeconomics and built this science under @DARPA-funded, third-party validated conditions. Twenty five years of research now runs off a fitness wristband. We backed Paul and @ImmersionNeuro because live experiences are becoming the moat. AI can do a lot, but it cannot put 500 people in a room and make them feel something together. The companies that get good at engineering the feelings are the ones that will own the next decade of customer loyalty. And now… there is a way to measure it.

Every drone that navigates by camera instead of GPS eventually runs into the same problem… Fly it over open water or a dense forest long enough and it loses its bearings. getVermeer.com fixed it. Their new feature, Recovery, lets a drone re-orient itself mid-flight after drifting off course without touching GPS at all. In field testing, it has re-established position after a drone drifted as far as three kilometers. I’ts sitting at an astonishing 95% success rate at one kilometer. As the aircraft flies, Recovery snaps images of the ground every 15 to 20 seconds. When the drone loses track of where it is, the system runs a two-stage search: A coarse pass to narrow down the likely region, then a fine match against satellite reference maps to pinpoint the exact spot. CTO and co-founder Suresh Kumar described it as a person using a landmark (like a tree, a bench, or a fork in the road) to find their way back after getting lost. This builds on Vermeer's Visual Positioning System, which already lets drones navigate in GPS-denied and spoofed environments using onboard cameras that are trained on more than 25,000 hours of aerial video. The system now runs with @LockheedMartin, @northropgrumman, @anduriltech, @aerovironment, @Firestorm_Labs, and Ukrainian drone-makers like @skyeton_inc. Recovery has already been field tested in Ukraine (the exact jammed/contested conditions it was built for). We led Vermeer's $10M Series A last year because GPS-denied navigation is the unglamorous problem sitting underneath the serious autonomy story in defense. You cannot promise a customer autonomous flight in a contested environment if the aircraft can get permanently lost the first time it crosses a lake. Congratulations to Brian Streem, Suresh Kumar, and the entire Vermeer team.

Mitchell Hsing was a grad student at MIT, still running chip equipment from the 1980s that needed a floppy disk to boot up. That frustration became InchFab (inchfab.com/), a shipping-container-size clean room that does almost everything a real fab does. It’s priced between $5 million and $15 million instead of billions. The trick isn't cheaper equipment for its own sake, but rather smaller wafers. InchFab started with one-inch wafers, moved to two-inch wafers, and now runs on four-inch wafers that are about 100 millimeters in diameter. Smaller wafers mean smaller plasma chambers and smaller chambers change the physics enough that the whole equipment stack shrinks and gets cheaper. Workforce development has become one of InchFab's biggest use cases. Countries trying to build domestic chip manufacturing face a 5-year wait for a full-scale fab while an InchFab gets a workforce trained and running years before that fab is finished. Full interview from IEEE Spectrum's Samuel K. Moore is worth the read (link in comments):

94% of neurology drugs fail in the clinic because doctors can't see inside a living brain the way they can biopsy a tumor. Our portfolio company, @Verge_Labs, just unveiled vBx-1.0, a foundation model that reconstructs the molecular state of a patient's brain from a routine blood draw. It has up to 3x greater accuracy than the prior state of the art. It's already showing: → 33% trial enrichment for Parkinson's patients likely to respond to levodopa → An estimated 43% reduction in trial size → In Verge's own ALS trial, the model flagged 34% of patients likely to discontinue treatment, before they ever enrolled Verge trained vBx-1.0 on more than 12,000 brain transcriptomes across 6,500 patients, backed by a physical inventory of 900+ frozen brain tissue samples. It has ten years of tissue data that most labs simply don't have. CEO @AliceXinliZhang calls tissue data the "LiDAR for neuroscience." Without it, every blood test or brain scan is a flat picture. vBx-1.0 adds the depth. The model is live for preview now through CONVERGE, with drug developers already lining up to run it against their own trial data. It’s backed by @EliLillyandCo, @BlackRock, and @YCombinator. Proud to be in this one from the start.

@goautolane just launched in Austin. It’s 13 Tesla Model Ys making autonomous restaurant deliveries, and it's live now with @tsodelivery. Founder @ben_seidl calls it air traffic control for driverless cars. It tells a business which vehicle is arriving, routes it to the right spot, and lets them pop the trunk for pickup. Autolane already runs in ten shopping centers with @SimonPropertyGp, @FederalRealty, jamestownlp.com, and @MacerichCo Miami and LA are next. Last-mile delivery is a $50 billion market by 2028. Ben's line stuck with us… “This is the mid-90s of e-commerce, but for autonomous commerce.”

@LongshotSpace just earned a spot in the @usairforce's Velocity Alliance. Longshot is solving a problem the entire defense industry has: hypersonic testing is too slow and too expensive. The old way is to build a missile, fire it once, get one data point, start over. Longshot's ground-based accelerator fires repeatedly with the same system, but many iterations, and real data instead of a single expensive guess. The Velocity Alliance was created by the Arnold Engineering Development Complex and the Air Force Test Center to modernize the country's test infrastructure. Longshot is the only member building kinetic accelerators that can test full-scale systems in low-level free flight. This fall, they begin hydrogen testing, targeting speeds above Mach 5 with payloads up to 2 kilograms. Early 2027 brings a larger launcher built to push hundreds of kilograms to Mach 5-7. Great work to the team at Longshot!

David Mayman flew the world's first operational jetpack around the Statue of Liberty in 2015. That's the same instinct running the company today, albeit, pointed at a much harder problem. @maymanaerospace builds tVTOLs, turbine-powered aircraft that take off and land vertically with no runway, no charging station, and perhaps most importantly… no delay. Their P100 carries 100 pounds of payload out of a 10-by-10-foot space, running on the same diesel and jet fuel already sitting in the field. In a contested environment, you need aircraft fast enough to survive, capable enough to strike or resupply, and cheap enough that losing one doesn't sink the mission. Most companies solve for one of those three while Mayman is building for all three at once. They're hiring across Avionics, Flight Testing, Software, and GNC. If you want to work on one of the hardest open problems in aerospace, apply here: careers.maymanaerospace.com/

Nine out of ten drug trials fail (usually because the wrong target got tested in the wrong patients). @Verge_Labs just launched to fix that. The company spent a decade building VergeDB, an incredibly massive data, and now they're training foundation models on top of it to build what they call a world model of human disease biology. The output is a "virtual biopsy." From a simple blood draw, the platform generates a simulated molecular picture of a patient's brain, then predicts which therapy will work, how the disease will progress, and how biomarkers will respond before a trial ever runs. Their first AI-discovered asset already completed a Phase 1b, and that trial data now feeds back into VergeDB. Four senior hires from Altos Labs, Calico, PostEra, and Flatiron just joined to build it. CEO @AliceXinliZhang put it simply, “The next decade of neuroscience drug development should look like precision oncology did a generation ago.”

Manual lab notebooks are still the norm in most biotech R&D, but that’s about to change. @CancerFreeBio just unveiled its AI Lab Assistant at @SusHiTech_SUJP, and it pulled in the Governor of Tokyo and a delegation of Japanese parliamentarians to see it. The company was there as part of the "National Team" under @StartupislandTw The technology is smart glasses paired with Vision-Language Models that watch a researcher work and turn that into structured data automatically. It eliminates over an hour of manual recording per experiment and automates timestamps and tamper-proof records, built for regulatory audit trails. It even recognizes lab instruments and procedures hands-free. This tool wasn't built to sell, but rather to protect data integrity on CancerFree's own Precision Anti-Cancer Drug Testing Platform (their cancer avatar technology for identifying low-risk drug treatments). Now the infrastructure they built to solve their own problem is becoming a second product line into the global Smart Lab market. Biotech R&D fails about 90% of the time and costs over a billion dollars per approved drug. Anything that protects data integrity and speeds up regulatory review attacks that problem at the root.

We've been Bitcoin believers for a long time. Here's where we stand today… The halving cycle is real, and it's not changing. Every four years, the supply of new Bitcoin halves. If demand holds, price goes up and each cycle sets a new floor. Bitcoin's market dominance has climbed from 40% to 50% to 61%, and we expect it to hit 70% after this one. But the halving is the obvious part. The less obvious part is what Bitcoin represents structurally. Governments cannot stop spending. They never have. Taxes have gone from effectively 0% before 1900 to 52% at the top end today. At some point, confidence in the currency breaks down. Argentina's peso has gone to zero three times in 50 years, and each time, people scrambled for something they could trust. Today, Argentina is one of the largest Bitcoin-using nations on earth. We put the odds of a major currency experiencing that kind of confidence collapse in favor of Bitcoin at roughly 5% per year, so if you run that through a Monte Carlo simulation, Bitcoin's expected value is considerably higher than its current price implies. The regulatory environment is catching up with The Genius Act and The Clarity Act. The next move of allowing businesses to operate entirely within a single blockchain currency with taxes paid automatically, makes the whole system frictionless. No bookkeeper. No transfer agent. No auditor. The infrastructure companies that make that future operational are the ones we're looking at right now. If you're building crypto infrastructure, payment rails, or business-layer blockchain tooling… reach out.

@Grifinapp turns your grocery run into a stock purchase. We backed Grifin because investing shouldn't require a lump sum, a brokerage account you're afraid to open, or money you don't have lying around. Grifin just announced a partnership with @getpriceapp, and the mechanism is simple: → Every Price.com Pro member gets Grifin free → Every Grifin member gets Price.com Pro free → Cashback earned shopping on Price.com buys stock on Grifin, starting at $1 Order groceries on @Instacart and earn cashback. Then that cashback buys you Instacart stock with no extra dollar spent. Grifin already serves people who never thought investing was for them (which is 178 million Americans by their count). This is the same thesis we had with @RobinhoodApp and @coinbase: whoever removes the friction between "I have a little money" and "I own a piece of something" wins the next generation of investors. Congrats to the team at Grifin on another step in democratizing investing!

Cooling systems don't get much attention until they fail. EVRCOOL makes sure that never happens. Their Denali Series Process Chillers just landed a nomination for 2026 Coolest Thing Made in Tennessee. The contest works like this: → Products manufactured in Tennessee compete head to head → Public voting decides who advances → Top 16 move forward toward the title We invested in EVRCOOL because industrial cooling is unglamorous and absolutely necessary. Factories, labs, and production lines depend on precision temperature control to keep running and EVRCOOL builds that backbone. Voting is open now in the Popular Round. Go vote for the Denali Series (link in comments)

The SEC recently told us that the US has gone from 8,000 public companies to around 4,000. That's a regulatory outcome. The system became so expensive that only companies worth billions could afford to go public. Sarbanes-Oxley compliance alone prices out every company that isn't already massive. The lawyers and accountants who administer the process get paid by the hour so they have every incentive to keep it complicated. The regulators talked to the biggest companies, the biggest companies wanted things to stay the same and the startups that might have challenged them never made it to the public markets. That loop is starting to break. We’re seeing the most innovation-friendly environment we've operated in since we started Draper Associates. The right to try in healthcare. Crypto clarity in finance. A stated goal of getting public company count back up significantly. For us as investors, the practical effect is simple: it's very hard right now to find a reason to deploy capital anywhere but the US. The founders who build during the window when rules are loosening are the ones who define the next era. That window is open.

📌 We backed @Thumbtack before most people understood what the problem even was. Marco Zappacosta ( @mlz ) saw clearly that tens of millions of skilled professionals like plumbers, cleaners, contractors, movers had no real marketplace. Customers had no reliable way to find and hire them. The whole system ran on word of mouth, Craigslist posts, and luck. Marco built the missing infrastructure. One unicorn-valuation round and that's the only outside capital Thumbtack has raised. The company now has millions of registered users and remains private and growing. Home services alone is a multi-hundred-billion dollar market that had been completely ignored by Silicon Valley. Marco saw that gap in 2008 when he was barely out of school. 📌

In 1993, Tony Perkins ( @HeyTPerk ) produced the first edition of Red Herring ( @digitalherring ) out of a spare office at Draper Associates on Seaport Court in Redwood City. It was two colors and printed on cheap paper with a psychedelic cover designed by VR pioneer Jaron Lanier. By 1996, the magazine had a shiny cover, national distribution, and revenues that eventually topped $20 million. Acquisition offers came in above $100 million before the dotcom market collapsed. Ad revenue for tech publications went to zero and Red Herring shut down, but Tony didn't stop. He co-founded Silicon Valley Bank ( @SiliconVlyBank ) and built The Churchill Club (the first community gathering in the Valley) while still at the bank. He launched Upside Magazine and co-wrote "The Internet Bubble", a book that called the dotcom crash before it happened. He started AlwaysOn, one of the first tech blogs and built conference businesses that drew tens of thousands of attendees. He also created Cryptonite to cover the Bitcoin economy. He coined "Global Silicon Valley." There are now 3.2 million tech publications, blogs, and podcasts, but Tony launched the entire category. There are hundreds of major tech conferences worldwide today, but Tony can say that he ran the first ones. The Red Herring started in our spare office. The photo from the 1996 cover featured @TimDraper and Steve Jurvetson ( @FutureJurvetson ) in suits with the Draper mailbox burning behind them and it still hangs at Bucks of Woodside.

Most VCs were counting lines of code in the early 2010s. More code, higher valuation. That was the logic, but it was wrong. More code means more surface area for bugs, more customer complaints, and more maintenance overhead. Vlad Magdalin ( @callmevlad ) walked in with the opposite thesis… what if designers could build production-ready websites without writing any code at all? We backed @Webflow from the first conversation. The early road was hard with multiple setbacks trying to get the company off the ground. Vlad kept going and he came to Draper University ( @draper_u ) to teach no-code development to students. Webflow now has millions of designers on the platform and it powers websites and e-commerce across industries, with drag-and-drop tools that handle responsive design, SEO, and hosting in one place. The no-code category Vlad helped build has since attracted billions in investment and dozens of competing platforms. Webflow remains the design-first option in that market. AI changed the calculus again. No-code tools plus AI assistance compressed the time between idea and live product to near zero. Vlad saw the shift before the market did.

Incredibly proud to announce that we led @autoaicam $2.6M round. Auto is the company @daredevildave and Sam Hare started after leaving Snapchat. Their bet is that the most-used piece of software on your phone isn't an app at all, but it’s the camera. You point it at things dozens of times a day to remember, communicate, and figure stuff out and almost none of that behavior has real software built for it. Auto turns your camera into a place to build your own tools. Early users are already running meal trackers, book club reading lists, backyard care plans, and makeup shopping guides through it. You can download Auto from the App Store now and see what your camera can actually do.

When Justin.tv told Tim that 40% of their users were watching strangers play video games, the room got quiet. Most investors heard that and saw a problem. We heard it and got curious. Stewart Alsop brought us into Justin.tv early. @justinkan had built a platform around livestreaming. First his own life, then anyone's. The piracy concerns that accompanied that growth prompted Michael Seibel to spin off Socialcam, which he built and later sold for $60 million. The video game audience continued to grow on the main platform. Twitch launched as a standalone product in 2011. Amazon acquired Twitch in 2014 for approximately $1 billion. @Twitch now generates more than $1.8 billion in annual revenue inside Amazon. 240 million users. The video game industry now outpaces all of Hollywood's combined box office. The team that built Justin.tv and Twitch went on to reshape multiple industries: Michael Seibel became president of Y Combinator. Kyle Vogt built Cruise Automation. Emmett Shear ran Twitch through its entire Amazon chapter. Justin Kan said it directly: without Tim writing that check, Twitch probably wouldn't exist. Michael Seibel said the same thing. Here's what that moment actually looked like from our side: Tim noticed that Justin.tv users were watching TV content they didn't have rights to — and the TV advertising was running alongside it. He asked if the users were seeing those ads. Justin said yes. Tim suggested billing the TV networks for the advertising reach. The best investments don't always look obvious.

DA8 is launched. 41 years of @TimDraper investing. 12 years with external investors, after spinning out of DFJ. $300M more to put to work in the next generation of founders. Our focus has not moved: early-stage companies led by technically serious founders taking on industries that haven’t been disrupted in 20+ years. We look for the kind of conviction that makes other investors uncomfortable. Crazy, weird, wild, unconventional ideas. Ideas that would make almost every IC debate because there are the very few who can see a future others just cannot. And slowly but surely, the world comes to see that future too. That approach gave Tim and the team early positions in @Tesla, @SpaceX, Hotmail, @Skype, @Baidu_Inc, @Bitcoin, @Coinbase, @Robinhood, @Oklo, @Polymarket, @XanaduAI, @iceye_global, and @Colossal. To the limited partners joining DA8: we're grateful for the trust. To the founders who chose Draper Associates: we're in your corner. If you're building something the world isn't ready for yet, we want to hear from you.

Steve Jurvetson was spending his weekends launching rockets. Tim noticed and said, "Steve, if you're going to spend that much time on an industry, find us the best rocket company and let's fund it." Two months later, Steve came back with an answer. The best rocket company was…. Elon Musk's. Elon was already running Tesla (a fledgling electric car company that wasn't out of the woods yet). Taking on two moonshots seemed like a lot. Even for Musk. Then they heard that Elon had already put $30 million of his own money into SpaceX. They backed it. The first rockets after the investment blew up on the launch pad. But… SpaceX went on to launch reusable orbital-class rockets (a first in the industry) rescue astronauts from the International Space Station, deploy over 8,000 Starlink satellites, and make a case for Mars colonization within this decade. The SpaceX investment came down to one signal… A founder so convinced by his own vision that he put $30 million in before asking anyone else for a dollar. That kind of conviction doesn't need much convincing.

Incredibly excited to be a part of NewLimit’s story. Their commitment to expanding human life is a mission that’s easy to get behind. Their medicine creation timeline has shrank from 10+ years to next year. Proud to be a part of the work that they’re doing! Congrats to Jacob Kimmel and the whole NewLimit team on their Series C.

Tim met Ted Leonsis at a Preview Travel board meeting. You know how some people walk into a room and everyone just feels better? That's Ted. In 1983, he had a near-death experience on an airplane. After landing safely, he sat down, and wrote out 101 life goals. All the things he wanted to do before he died. The list included: "#20. Start a company and sell it." "#22. Create world's largest media company." "#40. Own a sports franchise." "#41. Win a world championship." He built Redgate (one of the first technology media companies). He sold it to AOL and joined Steve Case and helped build AOL into what it became. He did well enough on AOL stock to buy the Washington Wizards and the Washington Capitals. Then the Capitals won the Stanley Cup. Write the list. Then go build it.

We're excited to lead Edvisor's Pre-Seed round. They're taking on the dinosaurs of the textbook industry and reinventing learning for the AI-era. Students are paying $150 for a static textbook they barely use. Degrees keep getting more expensive without teaching students skills for an AI-native world. Students and employers are rightly questioning the degree's usefulness. Edvisor (edvisor.ai) is rebuilding higher education for the AI-native world. The answer isn't more chatbots. Classrooms need to be redesigned from the ground up with AI in mind. Edvisor allows courses to be redesigned in minutes. Not weeks. Saves educators a 100 hours per semester and teaches students vital AI-fluency before they even graduate. In just a year Edvisor is live at over 50 universities including Berkeley, Duke, and more.

The best pitch Tim ever heard came from a guy swimming in a pool. 🏊‍♂️ Jim Hornthal, founder of Preview Travel, swam over to Tim in John Goodrich's pool and started talking fast. Tim had to slow him down just to make sense of his ramblings. According to Tim… that's usually a good sign. Jim was building a video/travel company smack in the middle of a time when nobody thought the internet could handle that kind of business. Bandwidth was a massive bottleneck so the idea looked early at best and asinine at worst. Tim backed him. Preview Travel went public in 1997 and then merged with Travelocity in 2000. This is the Draper pattern… Innovation sounds wrong until it's obvious. That window between wrong and obvious is exactly where we invest.

Advice to founders: “Hire slow, fire fast.” Everyone says that, but only a few actually follow it. Here’s what hiring slow actually means: "Wait until the wheels are coming off your business to add a new person. Wait until people are screaming at you that they've missed, you know, their kid’s baseball game four weekends in a row and they just can't handle it anymore..." And on firing fast: "If somebody is in there and they just don't seem to be pulling their weight... think of them as if you're in a boat, you're in a refugee boat and you're all paddling forward and there's one person paddling back the other way. You don't need that in the boat. And if you need to let them go tell them, look, you're a great person, these are your strengths, they're fantastic, but they're not a good fit for what we're doing here... There's always a better job for somebody if they're not really helping you."

Excited for Consensus to announce their Series B ($30M)! 2.5 million researchers are using Consensus right now to find papers, validate claims, and move their projects forward faster. The goal from here is to reach the next 10M researchers and build the operating system for how research gets done. Congrats to the team on a well-earned milestone!

.@CowboySpaceCorp just closed a $275M Series B at a $2B valuation. The AI era needs infrastructure that doesn't exist yet. Data has to get from point A to point B faster than current systems can handle. Cowboy is building that pipeline from orbit. Congrats to the Cowboy team. techcrunch.com/2026/05/11/th…

LightHearted has built a new sensory system for the human body. A silicon + photonics platform that captures cardiovascular signals from meters away at unprecedented resolution — decoding them in real time with AI, including heart sounds, blood pressure and ECG, without contact. Developed by a team of photonics PhDs, the technology traces back to high-performance sensing work originally funded for advanced applications, now repurposed to reinvent how we measure the human body.

Funding. The. Rebellion. We’re proud to back ideas that are weird, wild, and unconventional. Normal ideas get normal results. The companies that change how people live, work, and move through the world almost never make sense on a pitch deck. They make sense in hindsight. Our portfolio is full of founders who got laughed at, passed over, or told they were too early, too niche, too strange. We're proud of every single one of them.

Congrats to Liya Ngabola and Shurugwi Prime Breeders for taking home the $20,000 grand prize at the 2026 Tim Draper Utah Entrepreneur Challenge! The company operates in Shurugwi, Zimbabwe producing poultry while creating local employment. They’ll be using the funds to invest in 6,000 birds and anticipate generating $77,000 by the end of the year to build a hatchery and create opportunities for small-scale farmers to start their own business. Ngabola said, “Don’t let anyone pull you away from your idea. People laughed at me for competing with chickens—but I’ve now won three competitions. Keep going. Do what you love.”

We co-led Scout AI's $100M Series A. Scout is building "Fury", an AI model trained to operate and command military assets on actual military terrain, with real vehicles, running real missions. They’ve secured $11M in DoD contracts already and are one of 20 autonomy companies embedded with the Army's 1st Cavalry Division. They’re on track to deploy with the unit in 2027. Colby Adcock and Collin Otis are training models in the field with unpredictable environments and against real-world constraints. That's the kind of hard problem we've always backed. Tesla before EVs were taken seriously. SpaceX before private launch was real. Coinbase when crypto was a punchline. Scout is early. The problem is enormous. And the founders are obsessed. That's the pattern we look for.

Tim didn't find PTC by sitting in an office waiting for deals. He was out carrying pitch decks for other founders, trying to get a company called Tasvir off the ground. It didn't work, but the process taught him what the market was missing. Engineers needed 3D, and nobody was building it yet. That intel led him to Sam Geisberg, a Russian immigrant and founder of SPG, who had built something called reflexive technology a.k.a software that could flip between 2D and 3D mechanical drawings in a way that stumped even experienced software designers. Tim made an introduction. Don Fedderson came in. Steve Walske joined. Richard Harrison became employee number 10, eventually working his way up to CEO. They named the company Parametric Technology Corporation. PTC went public. Over 10 million mechanical designs have since been created on their Windchill and ProEngineer products. Richard Harrison said it simply: "Tim took a real risk on us when we got started. He thinks big, trusts the players, and has remarkable instincts." Find the technology that makes experienced people stop and say "I don't understand how this works." Back the team that built it. Get out of the way.

In 2013, Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev walked in with an idea. Free stock trading on your phone. Most investors passed as the conventional logic was that existing brokers would just copy the app and crush them. Why would the incumbents let two Stanford kids dismantle a commission-based business model that had worked for decades? Tim saw it differently. Baiju and Vlad were building a direct attack on complexity, commissions, and the idea that investing was only for people who already had money. As a condition of the seed investment, Tim put a restriction on their salaries until Robinhood secured its broker-dealer license. They agreed and then got to work. Robinhood now has millions of brokerage accounts with the majority opened by people who had never traded stocks before. The platform returned more than 3,000x the Draper Associates investment. Baiju Bhatt put it simply: "Tim took a bet on us." That's the job.

We are not Bitcoin maximalists. We are innovation maximalists. Bitcoin is incredible. It’s transparent, keeps perfect records, immutable, transparent, global, accepted everywhere, and has a 63% market share in crypto. One thing people don’t focus on is that Bitcoin is a tool that allows for innovation. Bitcoin is about investing in a great future where: → Artists get paid instantly for their work → Small businesses access global markets without banks → Creators own their audiences directly without having to pay platforms 30% → Innovation moves at the speed of code, not committees Innovation/Progress is the goal.

Tim found Skype in a newspaper. An article mentioned that the founders of Kazaa were building something new with the same file-sharing technology. He asked Howard Hartenbaum to track down the founders in London. Tim met Niklas Zennström in a pub and offered to fund the company (then called Shyper, built around shared Wi-Fi networks). Niklas called back a week later with a new plan: go after the long-distance carriers entirely. Tim said yes. The first Skype video call happened almost by accident. Tim had asked Niklas to set up video equipment for a board meeting interview. After it worked, Niklas laughed and told him it was the first one ever. Tim's response: "We have a winner. This will be huge." Over 2 billion people now have Skype accounts. First and second-generation Skype alumni have gone on to found over 900 new companies.

MightyFly now has — 3 full-scale aircrafts built — 400+ autonomous flights completed — $1M+ in revenue — A Special Airworthiness Certificate — A $220M LOI for intra-island delivery — A $50M healthcare contract signed And they just closed a $10M round. Traditional logistics needs warehouses, ground crews, runways, fuel networks. Every new route is a capital project. MightyFly's hybrid eVTOL carries 100–500 lbs up to 1,000 miles and makes multiple stops in a single flight with no runway and no ground crew sitting around waiting. The $319B expedited delivery market is going to be won by whoever cracks the unit economics of autonomous middle-mile logistics at scale. Manal Habib and the MightyFly team have been heads-down proving this works in the real world. Congrats to the whole team. Excited for what's next.

This program is the American dream. America’s Startup is the platform for the best and brightest to create companies that have never been seen with ideas that have never been thought of. There are opportunities that are far beyond our imagination. Thanks to @scrippsnews for having Tim on to talk about @america250’s opportunity for college and university students and to FOX for helping get the word out. livenowfox.com/news/america-…

Actual photo of us diving into investing opportunities that are “too crazy” for traditional VCs.

One of our portfolio companies just partnered to build habitats on the Moon and Mars. 🌕 🚀 Voyager Technologies teamed up with Max Space to build expandable habitats. It’s actual infrastructure for people to live and work in deep space. Not hotels/space-tourism, but habitats for people to live and work in. The best way to describe it is vacuum-sealed pillows that launch compact and inflate after deployment. The modules launch together in a single mission, with no ISS-style assembly required. They’re high-volume but relatively low-mass, built on 40 years of on-orbit experience. Ground validation is starting now with planned in-space demos later this decade. Dylan Taylor (Voyager CEO) said: "The Moon is no longer a flags-and-footprints exercise. It is the next operational domain in a growing space economy." Translation... We're moving from exploration to operations. So the only logical question is... Would you sign up to live on the Moon and Mars? businesswire.com/news/home/2…

40 years of backing founders. The people we mentored went out and started their own funds. Labrador Ventures. DFJ Growth. Threshold Ventures. Future Ventures. We started calling them "Draper Alumni." Then others touched by that same energy joined existing funds or launched new ones. That created this ripple effect you see here and a global network of VCs who learned the craft in the Draper ecosystem. US Network includes firms like Polaris Fund, Zone Ventures, Draper Triangle, Epic Ventures, and Timberline Ventures. Global Network spans Blume (India), Iron Pillar (India), Esprit (Europe), Draper Dragon (China), DFJ India, Right Click (Israel), Ben Franklin Ventures. The Draper Family tree keeps growing with Boost VC, Halogen VC, Path Ventures. And you've got Draper Richards, Draper International, Sutter Hill carrying that DNA forward. This is what happens when you actually invest in people, teach them how we think about risk, and give them room to build their own thing. Some VCs hoard knowledge. They treat their playbook like a trade secret. We did the opposite. We shared everything. The result is dozens of funds that took what they learned and made it their own. That's 100+ venture capital firms connected to the Draper network. Each one backing founders. Each one taking shots on the future. The best way to build an ecosystem isn't to control it. Give talented people the tools and the confidence, then watch them run with it.

Your down payment shouldn't be smaller than your closing costs. That's the reality for millions of Americans buying homes right now. Transaction costs hit 10% of a home's value. Fees eating up years of savings. Manual workflows involving 100+ touchpoints and 30-45 days to close. This is exactly why we backed Propy. Now they announced a $100M credit facility from Metropolitan Partners Group to roll up the title and escrow industry with AI. Here's what caught our attention back when we first invested: Natalia Karayaneva and her team weren't just talking about blockchain for real estate. They actually facilitated the first-ever blockchain property sale (Michael Arrington's apartment in Kiev, 2017). Since then, over $5 billion in transactions processed. Propy's using AI agents to automate escrow functions 24/7 from opening transactions to checking bank accounts to calling lenders. The result is a 70% reduction in manual work for acquired title companies. They've already closed two acquisitions ($5M and $6M) with $75M more in the pipeline. The thesis is simple: real estate transactions should work like modern financial markets. Automated. Accessible. Affordable. When closing costs exceed down payments, you have a barrier to wealth creation. Propy's fixing that. Congrats to Natalia and the team on this milestone.

This is the GoTo/Overture story. In an early board meeting, Bill explained that advertisers could pay for search terms, and GoTo would charge different prices for different terms. Before Bill, no search engine had that business model. → 1997: GoTo.com launches with pioneering pay-per-click model → 1999: GoTo.com goes public and expands → 2001: Rebrands as Overture, acquires other search engines → 2003: Yahoo acquires Overture for $1.6 billion This… is Draper.