Draper Associates

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.

Draper Associates (@DraperVC) company just replicated every YC startup in the latest batch using agentic founders. Incredible.

At @DraperVC, we back rational founders building irrational ideas. That thesis just got pressure-tested. Feltsense went through every startup in the entire YC W26 batch and built live replications of each one using AI agents, in days. @feltsensefund builds agentic founders: agents that source ideas, build product, and go to market on their own. When YC demo day dropped, they asked a simple question: could their agents compete with YC's world-class founders? The agents swarmed the YC website, studied every startup in the batch, reconstructed full PRDs, and started building. AI replication risk isn't a future problem. It's a present one. Every founder needs to be thinking about their real moat right now. This doesn't mean human founders are obsolete, actually the opposite. The ones who are digging deeper, getting more creative, and building out massive technical moats will clearly thrive. This is why we love investing deep tech and the incredible technical moat humans have created there. We are proud to have invested in Feltsense. Autonomous founder agents identifying real problems and building the companies to solve them. The future of company building looks very different from what we're used to.

We just rebuilt every startup in @ycombinator's latest demo day batch. Here's what our agentic "founders" pulled off and what it means for the future of startups. Fully useable products at the bottom of the thread below 🤖🧨

Tim found Skype in a newspaper. An article mentioned that the founders of Kazaa were building something new with the same file-sharing technology. He asked Howard Hartenbaum to track down the founders in London. Tim met Niklas Zennström in a pub and offered to fund the company (then called Shyper, built around shared Wi-Fi networks). Niklas called back a week later with a new plan: go after the long-distance carriers entirely. Tim said yes. The first Skype video call happened almost by accident. Tim had asked Niklas to set up video equipment for a board meeting interview. After it worked, Niklas laughed and told him it was the first one ever. Tim's response: "We have a winner. This will be huge." Over 2 billion people now have Skype accounts. First and second-generation Skype alumni have gone on to found over 900 new companies.

Very exciting time for #bitcoin as it makes its way into the financial mainstream. Can retail be far behind?

My biggest concern in VC right now is consensus investing. Everyone chasing the same trending AI companies. Not delivering decisions / writing checks until the right firms are already in the round. VC was always built on high risk (with high returns) but more and more it seems the industry is running from it. In my mind that's not venture, it's just asset management with better branding. At @drapervc, we do the opposite. @TimDraper has a line he says often when we come across what we see as a 'consensus investment': "Any investor can give these people money, it doesn't need to be us." Our rule of thumb is simple. The louder the IC gets, the more controversy there is about a company, the more likely we are to do the deal. VC was built on companies where we didn't even know if the future they were building would exist. That was what Draper was built on starting in 1985 and it is STILL what we invest in. ➡️ A few examples of non-consensus concepts in our current portfolio: - Autonomous vehicle infrastructure that only works if full self-driving goes unsupervised. - Artificial womb technology. - Accelerating moving walkways that can become sidewalk infrastructure in urban cities. - Autonomous founder agents that identify problems, build companies, and generate revenue independently. - Whole body rejuvenation therapy. - Animal embryo editing at scale. - Limb regeneration via bioelectric signalling. - Physical AI with sensory intelligence. "What if a machine could help you feel the true texture of a material, the taste of an ingredient, the efficacy of a new drug?" - Brain cell replacement therapy to eliminate neurodegenerative disease. Every one of these had people in the room who thought it was too early, too weird, or too uncertain. That's usually the "Bat-Signal" for us at Draper Associates. If you're building a future that most people say is impossible, that's exactly who we want to talk to. Venture Capital, back to its roots. #venturecapital #investing #VC #founders #startups

Incredible. Alice Gilman and John Schloendorn at R3 Bio are doing something that’s never existed before. They’re building genetically engineered organ systems. 🤯 We've always believed the most important companies get called crazy before they get called inevitable. See them featured in Wired here: wired.com/story/a-billio…

We’re incredibly proud of our portfolio company, CredShields for leading the OWASP Smart Contract Top 10 2026. The OWASP is the gold standard for application security frameworks and they’ve been setting the bar for over 25 years. Getting a seat at the table (let alone leading the analysis) is an incredible honor. Crypto protocols lost hundreds of millions of dollars to smart contract failures throughout 2025 and most of those protocols had been audited. This brings attention to the uncomfortable truth that audited does not necessarily mean resilient. CredShields built their ranking from real exploit data on the things actually taking down protocols in production. Their platforms aggregated incident patterns and identified where capital is most likely to be extracted. We backed CredShields because the Web3 infrastructure layer needed smarter security tooling, and watching them help write the rulebook was exactly what we were hoping for. The full OWASP Smart Contract Top 10 2026 is publicly available if you want to dig in.

One of our portfolio companies just won a global award for cleaning an airport. Arrow Labs' MIMS platform is now powering the Smart Cleaning System at Queen Alia International Airport in Jordan and ACI World just named it the Best Innovation in Airport Operations. The system ties together flight schedules, IoT sensors, passenger flow data, and cleaning robots into a single 24/7 control center. Cleaning teams are predicting messes and responding accordingly. QAIA was one of four airports globally to win this year. When we led Arrow Labs' $5M Series A it was our first-ever investment in the MENA region and the pitch was simple: 80% of the global workforce is deskless, and almost no one was building for them. Airports. Logistics. Facilities management. Telecoms. These industries run on frontline workers who have been completely ignored by enterprise software. Arrow Labs is fixing that. Congrats to Rami Darwish and the entire Arrow Labs team. This is what it looks like when a real problem gets a real solution.

Congrats to @cryptio_co on their $45M Series B! Their crazy bet that digital assets will be integrated into regulated financial markets isn’t looking so crazy anymore. Hundreds of companies are already using Cryptio for blockchain-based operations and that number is only going to grow and the services are only going to expand. Crazy ideas only look crazy until they happen! Proud of Antoine Scalia and the entire team.

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.