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 @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. 🤝

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.