Draper Associates

Scout AI just raised a $100M Series A that we co-led at @DraperVC. They’re building an AI model called Fury that operates military vehicles and drones with real intelligence. They’ve already secured $11M in DoD contracts and are one of 20 autonomy companies embedded with the Army's 1st Cavalry Division. Scout AI's CTO @collinotis made a point that stuck with me. These autonomous systems can be constrained to a specific geographic zone, or locked to require human confirmation before any action. The AI doesn’t act unilaterally. That matters to us. The question of who controls autonomous defense systems, and how, is one of the most important design questions of this decade. Scout is thinking about it seriously. Congrats to @adcock_colby, Collin, and the whole @ScoutAI_ team on the raise.

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.

Meet Chad. He is a Georgetown University student and one of 30 semifinalists heading to San Mateo this week to pitch at America's Startup: our national competition giving student entrepreneurs a shot at $25,000 in funding and mentorship. youtu.be/aEkBnggN9N4?si…

At Draper Associates, we backed... Tesla when electric vehicles were seen as niche. SpaceX when privatized space travel was unheard of. Coinbase when crypto was dismissed as a fad. Our job is to see what others don’t, to make early, high-conviction bets on companies and founders that will fundamentally reshape the world. If that’s you... Pitch us.

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.

@1752vc @paradigm @dragonfly_xyz @Initialized @1kxnetwork @BanklessVC @WhiteStarCap @GSR_io @cbventures @FigmentCapital @FulgurVentures @flowdesk_co @SeliniCapital @mf__xyz @colosseum @socialgraphvc @frachtisvc True

VCs that joined pre-seed rounds this year👇 @paradigm @1752vc @dragonfly_xyz @Initialized @1kxnetwork @BanklessVC @WhiteStarCap @GSR_io @cbventures @FigmentCapital @FulgurVentures @flowdesk_co @SeliniCapital @DraperVC @mf__xyz @colosseum @socialgraphvc @frachtisvc

@maxime_bucaille @TimDraper @BitGo @meetthedrapers @TheBitcoinConf @ArchNtwrk @HermeticaFi @JoyrideExchange @lxdev_ @DraperVC Tim Draper at the Bitcoin Conference feels right.

Utah entrepreneurs pitched live in front of Tim Draper. Five founders took the stage at the University of Utah's Lassonde Studios to compete in a live recording of Meet the Drapers (the Shark Tank-style show where real investment decisions get made in real time). The winner was Val Emanuel, co-founder of Rif Care, a period care brand making menstrual products from upcycled hemp fiber. She started the company after her own miscarriage led her to question what's actually in conventional period products. Now she's heading to the semifinals for a shot at $1 million. The other four pitches were equally compelling: • A wearable UV tracker for a state with the highest melanoma rates in the country • An air quality monitoring company • A respiratory health startup • A fintech platform We’ve been backing Utah founders for decades and Tim helped launch the state's first venture fund and sponsors the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge every year. Utah's founder ecosystem keeps producing. Read more here: ksl.com/article/514693…

1,000 high school students across 13 school districts in the US just got access to AI-powered workforce preparation. Stemuli has a real distribution partner in Heartland Forward, and they have a real expansion plan across all 20 Heartland states on the roadmap. The Heartland has 50 million people and a workforce gap that no one in Silicon Valley is paying attention to. We are.

Draper portcos killing it. Exhibit A.

HexemBio has raised $10.4M in seed financing led by @DraperVC, with participation from @SOSV and @seraphim_space, to advance its stem cell rejuvenation platform toward the clinic. The company is developing an approach designed to restore youthful function to a patient’s own blood stem cells before reinfusion. sosv.com/hexembio-raise… SynBioBeta 2026 is May 4-7th in San Jose, California, you can learn more about the conference and get your tickets here: syntheticbiologysummit.com/?utm_source=X&…

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.

Bitcoin might be worth an infinite amount of USD. During the Civil War, the South’s Confederate Dollar went through hyperinflation. After starting 1:1 with USD, it ended the war at over 10 million to 1. People lost faith and scrambled to trade their cash in for USD. The same might happen again, but with USD on the other end. And in the words of Tim Draper… forget gold. You can’t pay with gold at Starbucks. Governments are already hedging against this future by holding Bitcoin in their strategic reserves. If the system breaks down, you don’t want to be the one clamoring to withdraw cash from the bank or hoarding gold in your room.

The BitcoinFi Accelerator has wrapped. 🎓 Demo Day is April 21st. Register now to be notified when the team pitches drop — and to get early access to the founders building the next wave of BitcoinFi. 👉 bitcoinfi.network/register

At @DraperVC we are actively deploying, as early as possible, in Crypto companies. 8 deals so far this year. Reach out!

Founders must remember: Your word is your bond.

Attending my first @teamz_inc and was very fortunate to meet some of the best in @Cardano @F_Gregaard @phillip_pon @jj_siler and @SebastienGllmt @samizb @OrionFund @DraperDragon @Cardano_CF @emurgo_io @Emurgo_Japan @Emurgo_Ken

We invested in Tesla, Twitch, and Baidu, Inc. when they were very different ideas. But they all followed this playbook to become generational companies: 1. Make the first move You’ll have much less information than you need. But that’s okay. The truth is that founders will never have enough information upfront. Their actions produce the insights they need. 2. Be prepared to pivot Insights can come from anywhere — customers, the market, or your team. And they might lead you somewhere very different from where you started. YouTube started as a dating site. 3. Have a north star Be open to change but there’s something in your heart that you want to change. It motivates you and you want to make it better. Stay true to it through failures and pivots until the world finally sees what you see.

NVCA's 2026 Startup Innovator Winner: @RadiantNuclear! The world's first portable, zero-emissions power source that works anywhere isn't science fiction — it's being built today by the team behind Radiant's Kaleidos 1MW microreactor. 110x the energy density of existing diesel systems. In a shipping container. This is exactly the kind of bold, high-conviction innovation the venture community exists to back. Congratulations to the entire Radiant team. Join us May 14 in Menlo Park at the Rosewood Sand Hill to celebrate them alongside our other 2026 award winners → cvent.me/02BGLz?utm_sou…

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.