Draper Associates

Most investors look at the pitch deck first. We look at the person. Do they believe things are going to work out? We look for founders who leave it all on the field. The ones who don't panic when it looks bad. The ones who double down when others would fold. That's how you get through the J-curve in venture.

If other VCs have called you “too fringe”, “too crazy”, “too weird” Call us. At Draper Associates, we're doubling down on the stuff that makes traditional investors uncomfortable. We're funding: 🤖 AI, Robotics & Automation 🧬 Healthcare & Biotech 🚀 Space & Aerospace ₿ Crypto & Blockchain We want the wild, weird, and unconventional. We want the ideas that everyone calls too crazy. We want the problems everyone thinks are impossible to solve.

Yesterday we announced Cryptio's $45M Series B. Here’s what we’re going to do with the money.

Congratulations to @arklabshq on this fundraise. Bitcoin is programmable money 🟠

When you look at the AI lifecycle, general AI hype is cooling down, valuations have stalled and the secondary markets are flooded with offers. We're not at internet bubble levels yet, but most of the current AI companies won’t survive. The current opportunities are in the downstream effects. The best time to invest is when the industry is on the ground floor. That’s not general purpose AI anymore. But things like the intersection of robotics and AI, industry-specific AI and vertical applications... Ripe investment opportunities.

We invested in Rosy Soil before most knew what biochar was. Now? Forbes is covering their $5M Series A. We bet on Chad Massura and his team early because the houseplant soil market looks boring on the surface. But when you pull back the curtain you've got a $5B+ industry still running on peat (a material strip-mined from wetlands that actively accelerates climate change). Rosy spotted that problem and built the fix. It's a biochar-based soil that sequesters CO2, increases nutrient retention, and actually grows healthier plants. Every bag sold is carbon negative and is already on shelves at Target. They've attracted backers like Seth Goldman (Honest Tea), Brandin Cohen (Liquid IV), and Ben Chesler (Imperfect Foods). Congrats to Chad and the entire Rosy Soil team on the Forbes feature and a well-earned raise. 🔗 Full Forbes story in the comments.

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.

The polygraph hasn't changed since the 1920s. That’s 100 years with no innovation. Polygraphs are stressful and require a trained examiner, and they produce false positives that should make any investigator nervous. AI Seer just ran a 118-person IRB-approved lab study in Singapore. Their Multi-Spectral Reality Detector measured pupil dilation contactlessly and hit 83% accuracy. More importantly, it produced 10x less random variation than electrodermal activity (EDA) (the next-best polygraph measure). That's not a small gap. A researcher from Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau independently validated this in a separate trial at Central Police University. When pupil dilation and EDA were combined, both false positives and false negatives dropped. The results are being presented at a peer-reviewed forensic science conference, but it gets even more interesting… The automated mode runs about 10x faster and 10x cheaper than a traditional polygraph with a human examiner. The tech is already patented in Taiwan, with patents pending in the US and Singapore. This is worth paying attention to.

Count Down: only 33 days until the deadline of @America250 pitch competition! America's youth! Share your favorite business idea and pitch to a panel of investors along side me, @RosieRios @AndyTANGvc @michellebkwok @DraperVC @meetthedrapers @draper_u Rolling basis... please apply here america250.org

We're interested in the wild, the weird, the unconventional. Pitch us your craziest idea. And why you're the right person to build it.

Steve Jobs: First-time entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg: First-time entrepreneur Larry Ellison: First-time entrepreneur Don’t let a VC firm tell you that you need to be “more experienced”.

🚀 Introducing the next batch of BitcoinFi Accelerator teams. We're excited to lead this next batch with our partners @SupernormalFDN, @DraperDragon, and @DraperVC. Sponsered by @fairmint @GoMaestroOrg @MezoNetwork @rise_pay. 7 projects pushing the boundaries of what's possible on Bitcoin 🧵👇

At Draper, we have long believed Longevity Bio is emerging as its own investment vertical. Below is our evolving thesis on Long Bio, why now, where to invest, who the buyers are, and how this category compounds. Katherine Lee, one of our PhD / MBA Draper interns wrote this sharp capstone breaking it all down, and it crystallized something I’ve felt building in this space for years: Longevity is a convergence of biotech, data infrastructure, and delivery rails targeting the root causes of aging, not late-stage disease. For years, longevity was dismissed as wellness, vanity, or just simply science fiction. Today, it’s macroeconomic necessity. Aging is the universal risk factor. ~43% of global deaths are aging-associated, making longevity a multi-trillion-dollar category. The global 65+ population is already on its way to doubling. Fertility is below replacement across most developed economies. This is not optional infrastructure. It’s the shift from sick care, reactive care - to productive lifespan. From treating late-stage disease to extending healthspan, workforce participation, and human capital. 💡 Why now? - Scientific risk has come down. mTOR, senolytics, epigenetic clocks, reprogramming biology...what was theoretical is now experimentally validated and entering human trials. - The enabling stack is ready. Gene therapy, base and prime editing, programmable biologics, AI-native drug discovery, digital endpoints. - Capital and buyers are already in the water. Pharma is consolidating enabling technologies. Sovereign funds are backing longevity research. Consumer platforms are scaling biological measurement. 🧬 What excites us most is the three-layer architecture forming: 1. Measurement: turning biological age into data 2. Intervention: therapeutics, metabolic resilience, regenerative medicine 3. Delivery: employer benefits, clinics, consumer rails Better measurement drives better interventions. Scalable delivery drives recurring revenue & impact and each layer compounds the others. This is where frontier biotech meets AI, meets infrastructure, meets consumer pull. Longevity doesn’t require replacing physical infrastructure like climate. It isn’t physics constrained like space. It doesn’t displace workers like AI. It extends productive human lifespan, which is simply civilizational upside. We’re early, but the category formation is real. If you’re building in aging biology, regenerative medicine, metabolic health, healthspan infrastructure, or something even more frontier - we’re paying attention at @DraperVC. Let us know what companies, buyers, VCs we missed on our list. The next great vertical may not be another software category. It may be extending the human operating system itself. #longevity #longevitybiotech #investmentthesis #VC #longbio

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-2…

Other VCs: “Should we be using AI?” Us: Using AI for… • Detecting lies • Understanding emotions and voice personality • AI-powered diligence on companies and competitors • Helping portfolio companies through our AI hotline • Evaluating business plans through AI information gathering • A digital twin in a hologram

AI is going to take the jobs of the people who don't use AI.

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

We built an AI hotline for our portfolio companies. Founders can submit questions. Get answers. Access resources. All powered by AI. We're also using AI to: • Evaluate business plans without human intervention • Perform diligence on companies and competition • Detect patterns in voice and emotion during pitches • Help founders think through problems faster The goal: Let AI handle the repetitive work so we can focus on the relationship work. We've been backing AI companies for 10 years. Experimenting with AI for venture operations for 20. Now we're using it everywhere. The firms that resist AI will get left behind. The firms that embrace it will scale faster and make better decisions.