Draper Associates @DraperVC

Draper Associates has been named to @Inc.'s 2026 Founder-Friendly Investors list! This one means something specific: Inc. builds the list from what founders say about the investors who backed them. Our formula has not changed in four generations: back missionaries, not mercenaries. Fund the wacky and weird before the world understands it. Then get out of the way and let the founders do the impressive part. 63 unicorns and 400+ companies backed, and the part we are proudest of is that the people we backed would say it again. Thank you to every founder who vouched for us. The credit runs the other way. 🤝 inc.com/profile/draper…

The Tesla Roadster became the second flying car, after our portfolio company Alef. Alef's release is being picked up by CNN, Reuters, NBC and TMZ. We backed Jim Dukhovny and the Alef team in 2022, when "flying car" still sounded like scifi to most investors. Now Tesla is entering the category with their recent demo. We back the wacky and weird before the giants follow. Congratulations to Jim and the Alef team. 🤝 Watch Alef fly over a Tesla Roadster: youtube.com/watch?v=stmWap…

The @USNavy has selected Radiant to deploy our Kaleidos microreactor at Naval Weapons Station Crane, Indiana. With this selection, Radiant is now the only nuclear microreactor company with partnerships across the Army, Navy and Air Force. The Navy has more than 70 years of safe reactor operations. It wrote the playbook on reactor safety. Earning its confidence is powerful independent validation of Kaleidos. This milestone moves us closer to our goal: reliable, resilient nuclear power wherever the mission demands. Through our work with all three branches, we’re building a clear path from military deployment to nuclear energy at scale for government and commercial customers. Read more details here: radiantnuclear.com/news/navy-sele…

Founders... Investors are watching to see what you do right after they write the check. Good founders get straight to work. They've got the rocket fuel, now they're launching. Bad founders come back asking what to do next. If you’re getting a check, it’s because an investor believes that you already know where you’re going. They’re giving you fuel, not GPS directions. Also... too much celebration is a red flag. Pop some champagne, sure or in my case sparking apple juice. But then get back to building.

Mitchell Hsing was a grad student at MIT, still running chip equipment from the 1980s that needed a floppy disk to boot. That frustration became InchFab: a working clean room inside a shipping container. The trick isn't cheaper equipment for its own sake, but rather smaller wafers. Four-inch wafers shrink the whole fab down to something a startup can own. The AI chip conversation points at the leading edge: smaller nodes, bigger fabs, government subsidies. Underneath it sits a quieter category, the chips that will never ship in phone volumes, like sensors, specialty silicon and research devices. A container-size fab opens chipmaking to the builders those fabs were never designed for. InchFab started with one grad student who got tired of booting a fab from a floppy disk.

Austin is now the heart of autonomy. Got Chinese food delivered fully autonomously for the first time via @goautolane. Stays warm. Super reliable. Super fast. No need to tip. And the food was awesome. When will other cities catch up…

Reuters reports Kalshi is in advanced talks to raise $1B at a $40B valuation, up from $22B in May. Step back and look at what that number says about the category. Prediction markets were a regulatory punchline a few years ago. Too fringe for serious capital, dismissed as gambling with extra steps. Now the fastest-moving investors in the world are competing to fund them, and valuations are doubling in months. We backed @Polymarket when that dismissal was the consensus. It has since reached a $9B valuation with validation from ICE, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange. The thesis was that markets aggregate truth better than pundits, and the internet would eventually want a price on everything. When a category this young starts attracting capital this fast, it isn't a bubble forming. It's the world catching up to what the early builders already knew: prediction markets are financial infrastructure, not a novelty. The ideas that sound too weird to fund become the categories everyone races into eventually.

We led a strategic round in Xverse, backing its push to become a self-custodial Bitcoin neobank. Buying Bitcoin in the mid-2010s was not necessarily hard because of lack of conviction. It was hard knowing that holding your own keys meant giving up everything a bank does for you. Xverse closes that tradeoff: a self-custodial vault with Earn, Cash and Borrow rails, so Bitcoin holders can earn yield, spend, and borrow without ever handing over their keys. Since launching in 2021 the platform has passed two million downloads. Bitcoin DeFi hit record total value locked in 2025 while exchange balances fell to record lows in 2026. People want their Bitcoin working without a middleman holding it. Congratulations to Ken Liao and the @Xverse team. 🤝

Incredible launch from one of our portcos today!

Solo @projectsolo

3 weeks ago

This AI agent joined 30+ Discord servers overnight and sent 500+ messages. Live counter next to its name: “Humans who noticed: 0” All it was told: get past every CAPTCHA and accept all the terms. It did. No custom exploit, just browsing and clicking. CAPTCHA still guards most

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Incredible to be part of Xverse's journey!

Xverse - Bank on Bitcoin @xverse

3 weeks ago

We're proud to share today that Xverse has closed a strategic funding round led by the legendary @DraperVC. Both @trustmachinesco and @DraperDragon also joined in the round.

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Proud of the @AiSeerco and @facticityai team. Their citation harness just hit 98% on a new legal hallucination benchmark—matching the most expensive frontier models at a fraction of the cost. This is how AI becomes usable in court, not just in demos. Generate first. Verify before filing.

ArAIstotle Truth Seeker @ArAIstotle

a month ago

Want to save up to 100X on verifying your legal citations with similar accuracy to frontier models? Now you can! x.com/i/article/2103…

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Every machine waits for a signal. When it breaks, everything goes blind. We started Offline Protocol by keeping people connected when networks failed. Today, that same technology runs on hundreds of thousands of devices worldwide. Now we're taking it further: resilient coordination for physical systems. Machines, people and AI agents that keep working together over whatever path remains. Where we are today: → 350,000+ devices across 140+ countries → Nearly 20,000 new accounts in August alone → 11,500+ local networks active this month → 60,000+ SDK downloads → 440,000+ location proofs received in the last 30 days → Zero paid acquisition Earlier this year, we closed a new round led by @DraperVC to turn our consumer scale into a rapidly growing enterprise business. Over the past month, we've begun working with partners including a global wind-energy manufacturer, an agricultural IoT provider, a fleet telematics platform, a physical AI operating system, and a data streaming platform, alongside teams in aerospace and satellite systems, embedded silicon and consumer wearables. Our pipeline also spans maritime and industrial monitoring, equipment custody, secure device identity, airline catering and restaurant operations. Wherever machines operate, Offline Protocol coordinates. Learn more at offlineprotocol.com

The internet has no idea who anyone actually is. For thirty years that was an inconvenience. With AI bots now rivaling human activity online, it's the defining infrastructure problem of the decade. Aidan McCarty (@aidan_mccarty_) saw it in 2016, when the civic platform he built with his brother Liam (@LiamHaleMcCarty) got flooded with fake and stolen identities. In 2020 they started Verified to fix it, years before the rest of the market woke up. Aidan joined Brian E. Thomas (@DivergentCIO) on the Digital Executive podcast (@CoruzantPod) to talk through the build. What Verified does: from a phone number and first name, it confirms a real human and autofills verified data in a median of under 10 seconds. No captchas, no document uploads, no losing legitimate customers to the friction meant to catch fakes. 253 million Americans instantly verifiable, 4x growth in the past year, 31% more users converting, and millions of verifications annually across financial services and healthcare. The founders who start fixing a problem before the world agrees it exists are the ones holding the infrastructure when it does.

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

Tim Draper @TimDraper

a month ago

Wow! I am in good company! forbes.com/sites/alexknap…

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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-…

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?

draper.vc/newsroom/how-w…

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.