Draper Associates

@LongshotSpace just earned a spot in the @usairforce's Velocity Alliance. Longshot is solving a problem the entire defense industry has: hypersonic testing is too slow and too expensive. The old way is to build a missile, fire it once, get one data point, start over. Longshot's ground-based accelerator fires repeatedly with the same system, but many iterations, and real data instead of a single expensive guess. The Velocity Alliance was created by the Arnold Engineering Development Complex and the Air Force Test Center to modernize the country's test infrastructure. Longshot is the only member building kinetic accelerators that can test full-scale systems in low-level free flight. This fall, they begin hydrogen testing, targeting speeds above Mach 5 with payloads up to 2 kilograms. Early 2027 brings a larger launcher built to push hundreds of kilograms to Mach 5-7. Great work to the team at Longshot!

David Mayman flew the world's first operational jetpack around the Statue of Liberty in 2015. That's the same instinct running the company today, albeit, pointed at a much harder problem. @maymanaerospace builds tVTOLs, turbine-powered aircraft that take off and land vertically with no runway, no charging station, and perhaps most importantly… no delay. Their P100 carries 100 pounds of payload out of a 10-by-10-foot space, running on the same diesel and jet fuel already sitting in the field. In a contested environment, you need aircraft fast enough to survive, capable enough to strike or resupply, and cheap enough that losing one doesn't sink the mission. Most companies solve for one of those three while Mayman is building for all three at once. They're hiring across Avionics, Flight Testing, Software, and GNC. If you want to work on one of the hardest open problems in aerospace, apply here: careers.maymanaerospace.com

Nine out of ten drug trials fail (usually because the wrong target got tested in the wrong patients). @Verge_Labs just launched to fix that. The company spent a decade building VergeDB, an incredibly massive data, and now they're training foundation models on top of it to build what they call a world model of human disease biology. The output is a "virtual biopsy." From a simple blood draw, the platform generates a simulated molecular picture of a patient's brain, then predicts which therapy will work, how the disease will progress, and how biomarkers will respond before a trial ever runs. Their first AI-discovered asset already completed a Phase 1b, and that trial data now feeds back into VergeDB. Four senior hires from Altos Labs, Calico, PostEra, and Flatiron just joined to build it. CEO @AliceXinliZhang put it simply, “The next decade of neuroscience drug development should look like precision oncology did a generation ago.”

Manual lab notebooks are still the norm in most biotech R&D, but that’s about to change. @CancerFreeBio just unveiled its AI Lab Assistant at @SusHiTech_SUJP, and it pulled in the Governor of Tokyo and a delegation of Japanese parliamentarians to see it. The company was there as part of the "National Team" under @StartupislandTw The technology is smart glasses paired with Vision-Language Models that watch a researcher work and turn that into structured data automatically. It eliminates over an hour of manual recording per experiment and automates timestamps and tamper-proof records, built for regulatory audit trails. It even recognizes lab instruments and procedures hands-free. This tool wasn't built to sell, but rather to protect data integrity on CancerFree's own Precision Anti-Cancer Drug Testing Platform (their cancer avatar technology for identifying low-risk drug treatments). Now the infrastructure they built to solve their own problem is becoming a second product line into the global Smart Lab market. Biotech R&D fails about 90% of the time and costs over a billion dollars per approved drug. Anything that protects data integrity and speeds up regulatory review attacks that problem at the root.

We've been Bitcoin believers for a long time. Here's where we stand today… The halving cycle is real, and it's not changing. Every four years, the supply of new Bitcoin halves. If demand holds, price goes up and each cycle sets a new floor. Bitcoin's market dominance has climbed from 40% to 50% to 61%, and we expect it to hit 70% after this one. But the halving is the obvious part. The less obvious part is what Bitcoin represents structurally. Governments cannot stop spending. They never have. Taxes have gone from effectively 0% before 1900 to 52% at the top end today. At some point, confidence in the currency breaks down. Argentina's peso has gone to zero three times in 50 years, and each time, people scrambled for something they could trust. Today, Argentina is one of the largest Bitcoin-using nations on earth. We put the odds of a major currency experiencing that kind of confidence collapse in favor of Bitcoin at roughly 5% per year, so if you run that through a Monte Carlo simulation, Bitcoin's expected value is considerably higher than its current price implies. The regulatory environment is catching up with The Genius Act and The Clarity Act. The next move of allowing businesses to operate entirely within a single blockchain currency with taxes paid automatically, makes the whole system frictionless. No bookkeeper. No transfer agent. No auditor. The infrastructure companies that make that future operational are the ones we're looking at right now. If you're building crypto infrastructure, payment rails, or business-layer blockchain tooling… reach out.

@Grifinapp turns your grocery run into a stock purchase. We backed Grifin because investing shouldn't require a lump sum, a brokerage account you're afraid to open, or money you don't have lying around. Grifin just announced a partnership with @getpriceapp, and the mechanism is simple: → Every Price.com Pro member gets Grifin free → Every Grifin member gets Price.com Pro free → Cashback earned shopping on Price.com buys stock on Grifin, starting at $1 Order groceries on @Instacart and earn cashback. Then that cashback buys you Instacart stock with no extra dollar spent. Grifin already serves people who never thought investing was for them (which is 178 million Americans by their count). This is the same thesis we had with @RobinhoodApp and @coinbase: whoever removes the friction between "I have a little money" and "I own a piece of something" wins the next generation of investors. Congrats to the team at Grifin on another step in democratizing investing!

We built a way for founders to talk to @TimDraper before they ever meet him. It's called the Tim Draper Digital Twin, and it lives on our Contact page at draper.vc/contact Founders can pitch to Tim’s twin directly and ask how Draper Associates evaluates a deal. You can get a real answer on whether we're the right fit before spending weeks chasing a meeting. Tim has backed @Tesla, @SpaceX, @Coinbase, @Robinhood, and Hotmail, among hundreds of others, across 40 years. His pattern recognition on what makes a founder worth funding came from thousands of pitches, wins, and misses. We built the Digital Twin to make that pattern recognition available on demand. A few things it can help with: → How we think about mission versus market size → What separates a missionary founder from a mercenary one → Whether your stage and sector fit what we're looking for right now Human partners still read and decide on every real deal. The Digital Twin is the front door. If you've got a pitch, go talk to Tim. draper.vc/contact

coolestthingmadeintn.com | evrcool.com

Cooling systems don't get much attention until they fail. EVRCOOL makes sure that never happens. Their Denali Series Process Chillers just landed a nomination for 2026 Coolest Thing Made in Tennessee. The contest works like this: → Products manufactured in Tennessee compete head to head → Public voting decides who advances → Top 16 move forward toward the title We invested in EVRCOOL because industrial cooling is unglamorous and absolutely necessary. Factories, labs, and production lines depend on precision temperature control to keep running and EVRCOOL builds that backbone. Voting is open now in the Popular Round. Go vote for the Denali Series (link in comments)

The SEC recently told us that the US has gone from 8,000 public companies to around 4,000. That's a regulatory outcome. The system became so expensive that only companies worth billions could afford to go public. Sarbanes-Oxley compliance alone prices out every company that isn't already massive. The lawyers and accountants who administer the process get paid by the hour so they have every incentive to keep it complicated. The regulators talked to the biggest companies, the biggest companies wanted things to stay the same and the startups that might have challenged them never made it to the public markets. That loop is starting to break. We’re seeing the most innovation-friendly environment we've operated in since we started Draper Associates. The right to try in healthcare. Crypto clarity in finance. A stated goal of getting public company count back up significantly. For us as investors, the practical effect is simple: it's very hard right now to find a reason to deploy capital anywhere but the US. The founders who build during the window when rules are loosening are the ones who define the next era. That window is open.

Three things are converging right now that make bio and health the most interesting investment category we've seen in a decade. 1. The tools are finally accessible to startups. CRISPR, computational biology, stem cell research, cloning, etc. These used to live exclusively inside massive institutions with massive budgets, but that's no longer true. A founder with the right team can now go after root-cause cures that would have required a pharma giant five years ago. 2. The regulatory environment is opening. The right to try is real. Medical tourism is forcing the US to compete for patients it used to take for granted. We’re seeing an active push for innovation over incumbent protection. The window where a startup can challenge a $500B industry with bad service at high cost is wider than it's been in 40 years. 3. The incumbent model is visibly failing. People are living shorter lives despite more pharmaceutical spending. The chemotherapy-to-drug-to-drug-to-dialysis pipeline is expensive, slow, and produces worse outcomes than the industry wants to admit. When an industry has bad service at high cost inside a regulatory moat… that's historically when the best entrepreneurs show up. We've been backing founders in this space because we believe bio cures (actual one-time treatments that eliminate the root cause) are closer than the market prices in. The business model around a one-time cure still needs to be built and the insurance industry wasn't designed for it. If you're building in bio and health, we want to talk.

THE MAISON IS OPENING. Today, Voyage reveals the Maison for Mind Computing. We are designers, neuroscientists, philosophers, and engineers building neural interfaces for your inner voice, as objects of desire. Backed by Draper Associates and other believers. Apply to be a Member of the Maison. Or join us inside — we’re hiring @maisonvyg --> voyage.inc

The hardest part of early stage investing isn't finding the deal. It's taking a bet on a view when everyone around you disagrees with it. Most of the best investments I've seen look obviously wrong for at least 12 months before they look obviously right.

📌 We backed @Thumbtack before most people understood what the problem even was. Marco Zappacosta ( @mlz ) saw clearly that tens of millions of skilled professionals like plumbers, cleaners, contractors, movers had no real marketplace. Customers had no reliable way to find and hire them. The whole system ran on word of mouth, Craigslist posts, and luck. Marco built the missing infrastructure. One unicorn-valuation round and that's the only outside capital Thumbtack has raised. The company now has millions of registered users and remains private and growing. Home services alone is a multi-hundred-billion dollar market that had been completely ignored by Silicon Valley. Marco saw that gap in 2008 when he was barely out of school. 📌

In 1993, Tony Perkins ( @HeyTPerk ) produced the first edition of Red Herring ( @digitalherring ) out of a spare office at Draper Associates on Seaport Court in Redwood City. It was two colors and printed on cheap paper with a psychedelic cover designed by VR pioneer Jaron Lanier. By 1996, the magazine had a shiny cover, national distribution, and revenues that eventually topped $20 million. Acquisition offers came in above $100 million before the dotcom market collapsed. Ad revenue for tech publications went to zero and Red Herring shut down, but Tony didn't stop. He co-founded Silicon Valley Bank ( @SiliconVlyBank ) and built The Churchill Club (the first community gathering in the Valley) while still at the bank. He launched Upside Magazine and co-wrote "The Internet Bubble", a book that called the dotcom crash before it happened. He started AlwaysOn, one of the first tech blogs and built conference businesses that drew tens of thousands of attendees. He also created Cryptonite to cover the Bitcoin economy. He coined "Global Silicon Valley." There are now 3.2 million tech publications, blogs, and podcasts, but Tony launched the entire category. There are hundreds of major tech conferences worldwide today, but Tony can say that he ran the first ones. The Red Herring started in our spare office. The photo from the 1996 cover featured @TimDraper and Steve Jurvetson ( @FutureJurvetson ) in suits with the Draper mailbox burning behind them and it still hangs at Bucks of Woodside.

Most VCs were counting lines of code in the early 2010s. More code, higher valuation. That was the logic, but it was wrong. More code means more surface area for bugs, more customer complaints, and more maintenance overhead. Vlad Magdalin ( @callmevlad ) walked in with the opposite thesis… what if designers could build production-ready websites without writing any code at all? We backed @Webflow from the first conversation. The early road was hard with multiple setbacks trying to get the company off the ground. Vlad kept going and he came to Draper University ( @draper_u ) to teach no-code development to students. Webflow now has millions of designers on the platform and it powers websites and e-commerce across industries, with drag-and-drop tools that handle responsive design, SEO, and hosting in one place. The no-code category Vlad helped build has since attracted billions in investment and dozens of competing platforms. Webflow remains the design-first option in that market. AI changed the calculus again. No-code tools plus AI assistance compressed the time between idea and live product to near zero. Vlad saw the shift before the market did.

@autoaicam @daredevildave Use the offer code: DRAPERVC to get a month free of Auto Plus account.

Incredibly proud to announce that we led @autoaicam $2.6M round. Auto is the company @daredevildave and Sam Hare started after leaving Snapchat. Their bet is that the most-used piece of software on your phone isn't an app at all, but it’s the camera. You point it at things dozens of times a day to remember, communicate, and figure stuff out and almost none of that behavior has real software built for it. Auto turns your camera into a place to build your own tools. Early users are already running meal trackers, book club reading lists, backyard care plans, and makeup shopping guides through it. You can download Auto from the App Store now and see what your camera can actually do.

Announcement: blog.auto.inc/auto-raises-2-… App Store: apps.apple.com/us/app/auto-yo…

Tumbleweed was the first SaaS company. Jeff Smith and his team were selling software as a service before the term existed. The founders eventually moved away from it under cash pressure and watched the entire tech industry spend the next two decades racing toward exactly what they'd already built. The company refocused on secure email, file transfer, and messaging infrastructure. They became the category leader and went public. Billions of messages now move through secure communications infrastructure that Tumbleweed helped pioneer like financial communications, government systems, enterprise file transfers. After the exit, Jeff got a PhD in music and then built @Smule, a social music platform that reached unicorn valuation. Two completely different industries with two significant outcomes. We pay a lot of attention to founder patterns. Jeff is a clean example of what we look for: someone who identifies a real infrastructure gap, builds toward it with conviction, and has the range to do it again in a completely different context. The SaaS model Jeff pioneered in the 90s now underpins most of the software economy. The secure communications infrastructure Tumbleweed built moves billions of messages daily. The founders who see things a decade early rarely get the credit they deserve at the time.