Absolutely legendary to be on this list. That’s our founder.

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. 🤝

Hey Marc, welcome to the neighborhood. @draper_u @pmarca a16z.news/p/introducing-the-…

Bitcoin maximalists will hate this, but leaving Bitcoin untouched is the riskiest thing you can do to it. The instinct to protect the base layer makes sense. But a store of value that does nothing else cedes every other function of the financial system to chains that were only ever experimentation. NFTs, tokens, DeFi, all of it was a testing ground. Ordinals instead of NFTs. Runes and BRC20 instead of ERC20s. The experiments proved the demand. The work now is bringing those functions home to the strongest asset. Bitcoin either becomes a true programmable blockchain capable of replacing the financial system, or it stays a vault while the rest of finance gets rebuilt somewhere less secure.

AI will take everyone’s jobs. ... until they invent new ones. AI alone probably won’t take your job. But someone using AI might. So you should lean in to AI. People react to new technologies in three ways: 1. The Resisters: "AI is ruining everything!" 2. The Ignorers: “I don’t understand AI.” 3. The Adopters: "How can I use this to get better?" It's not AI vs. humans. It's humans with AI vs. humans without AI. We’re not cutting our team because of AI. We’re GROWING it. Our team with AI can accomplish 10x more than our team without it. Businesses without websites died in the 90s. Same thing is happening now. If you're not experimenting with AI in your industry, someone else is. And they're going to serve your customers better. Faster. Cheaper. The buggy whip makers of the 1800s became car mechanics. They pivoted or perished. Which camp are you in?

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.

The USD.infra Vault Is Now Open 🔓 The Internet runs on digital infrastructure. Now with DAWN, that infrastructure is financeable on-chain. Introducing the USD.infra Vault: A new way to finance digital infrastructure powering AI compute and connectivity.

Congrats to Alsa @AisaOneHQ team! As Alsa's early investor, we are excited to see the progress. As GTM become truly agentic by default, Agents can now do the work, not just surface insights, while Alsa provides the tools and data needed to research markets, track competitors, uncover search gaps, understand customer conversations, and identify prospects.

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. 🤝

Draper Associates likes being first to the game. Here's the list of firsts across forty years: First fund to advertise. First to invest in the internet. First to build an affiliate model, domestic and international. First into Eastern Europe. First into viral email (Hotmail). First to fund an electric car company (@Tesla). First to fund a rocket company (@SpaceX). First VC to buy Bitcoin. First human accelerator for entrepreneurs. 🥇

We backed @colossal when de-extinction sounded like science fiction. Now? It looks like a fertilized chicken egg, cracked open, moved into an artificial shell, and hatched into a healthy chick without ever touching a natural eggshell again. The shell took 14 engineering iterations and the team landed on a hexagonal structure with a permeable membrane that let oxygen diffuse in at ambient temperature. All with a window on top so the embryology team could track development in real time. This matters so much more beyond the chicken. The South Island giant moa stood up to 3.5 meters tall. No bird alive today is large enough to carry a moa egg to term. Colossal needed an artificial incubation system before moa de-extinction could move from concept to reality. This is that system. Now proven. We've watched Colossal go from "de-extincting animals is sci-fi" to 3 dire wolf puppies on the ground. Now they've solved the core engineering problem behind artificial eggs. We invest in founders building the future before it's obvious. This is what that looks like in practice.

Draper Associates has been named to @TIME's America's Top Venture Capital Firms 2026 list. We’re proud to be included. Our formula hasn't changed in four generations: back missionaries, not mercenaries. Fund the wacky and weird before the world understands it. Let the founders do the impressive part. Grateful to every builder who trusted us with their craziest, boldest idea. More where that came from. time.com/article/2026/08/12/…

If other VCs have called you “too fringe”, “too crazy”, “too weird” Call us.

@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.