Draper Associates

If hundreds of AI startups are failing.. what’s happening to their VCs? 😬 Learnings from our research in the video + VCs most likely to be affected up on Gutcheck

One billion monthly active users. That's the network Pavel Durov built with @Telegram and the network that TON sits on top of. We were introduced to @durov through our broker-venture partner, Zach Cefaratti. Pavel meets with one person a week and @TimDraper made the list. The conversation in Dubai covered what Telegram was really building: not just a messaging app, but a global infrastructure play for free communication and open financial access. TON (The Open Network) is a decentralized blockchain integrated directly into Telegram. Proof-of-stake consensus. Sharding for transaction scale. Toncoin as the native currency for fees, staking, and governance. The architecture was built for a billion users from the start, which is rare. The distribution was already there. You didn’t need to convince anyone to download a new app. Telegram's billion users are already the network. TON just adds a financial layer on top of a communication layer people already trust. Pavel built Telegram because he believed people had a right to communicate without government interference and TON extends that to transactions. A billion people communicating freely. The same billion, eventually, transacting freely.

DA8 is launched. 41 years of @TimDraper investing. 12 years with external investors, after spinning out of DFJ. $300M more to put to work in the next generation of founders. Our focus has not moved: early-stage companies led by technically serious founders taking on industries that haven’t been disrupted in 20+ years. We look for the kind of conviction that makes other investors uncomfortable. Crazy, weird, wild, unconventional ideas. Ideas that would make almost every IC debate because there are the very few who can see a future others just cannot. And slowly but surely, the world comes to see that future too. That approach gave Tim and the team early positions in @Tesla, @SpaceX, Hotmail, @Skype, @Baidu_Inc, @Bitcoin, @Coinbase, @Robinhood, @Oklo, @Polymarket, @XanaduAI, @iceye_global, and @Colossal. To the limited partners joining DA8: we're grateful for the trust. To the founders who chose Draper Associates: we're in your corner. If you're building something the world isn't ready for yet, we want to hear from you.

My take on @SpaceX going public: → $75 billion raised → Largest IPO in history → Stock up 19% on day one. Elon has brought new life to the space and transportation markets. Transportation used to be the big three with very little innovation, and @Tesla opened our minds to what could be. Space used to be only what governments said it could be, and NASA only had the budget to keep itself in business, and SpaceX opened our eyes to extraordinary Star Trekkian possibilities. It got me thinking about what my friend Cree Edwards said about physics. Physics has been stuck in Einsteinian particles for almost a century with no real innovation. Cree Edwards theorized, “I think we are all energy.” So…not e=mc^2, but e=e. There is no such thing as mass. If you look at what an electron microscope shows as an atom, you might come to the same conclusion. More on that in my new book. The biggest returns don't come from the financial models, but rather from the moment a founder forces the world to see something differently. Elon did that with PayPal. He did it with Tesla and he just did it again with SpaceX. I think Elon and all those entrepreneurs who take on the status quo are going to really transform our universes in the next century. msn.com/en-us/money/ne…

Most Americans can’t access the asset class that creates millionaires. Our portfolio company, Mogul, is changing that. CEO Alex Blackwood broke down fractional real estate investing for ABC. When we backed Mogul, the thesis was simple: real estate built more American wealth than any other asset class, and most Americans can't access it. A starter home now requires six figures upfront. Managing a rental is a second job. Mogul rebuilt the model: → Buy shares in individual properties starting at $250 → Rental income hits your account monthly → Appreciation tracks in real time → Tax benefits flow through at year end The underwriting is what sold us. Alex and his co-founder came from Goldman Sachs' real estate private equity group, and fewer than 0.1% of the properties they review make it onto the platform. Investors have averaged 18.8% annually, with 10-12% of that paid out as monthly rental income. Congrats to Alex and the Mogul team. First of many national spotlights.

Steve Jurvetson was spending his weekends launching rockets. Tim noticed and said, "Steve, if you're going to spend that much time on an industry, find us the best rocket company and let's fund it." Two months later, Steve came back with an answer. The best rocket company was…. Elon Musk's. Elon was already running Tesla (a fledgling electric car company that wasn't out of the woods yet). Taking on two moonshots seemed like a lot. Even for Musk. Then they heard that Elon had already put $30 million of his own money into SpaceX. They backed it. The first rockets after the investment blew up on the launch pad. But… SpaceX went on to launch reusable orbital-class rockets (a first in the industry) rescue astronauts from the International Space Station, deploy over 8,000 Starlink satellites, and make a case for Mars colonization within this decade. The SpaceX investment came down to one signal… A founder so convinced by his own vision that he put $30 million in before asking anyone else for a dollar. That kind of conviction doesn't need much convincing.

We are super excited to share with you our initial release of Lucky Engine. We are building a robotics engine from the ground up to be what we wished we could find in a simulator before

How we rebuilt Draper Associates’ investing engine and workflows with an in-house AI stack 👇 Off-the-shelf CRMs, deal-flow “platforms,” automation suites are all great for box-ticking, not for the way we invest. We move fast, hunt edge cases, and lean on four decades of pattern recognition. So we built the system we needed. Powered by @airtable, Otter AI, @Mappa_ai, @OpenAI APIs, and @Zapier, plus a team of fearless MBA interns, our no-code stack now: • Captures every inbound: emails, decks, meeting transcripts, post-investment updates • Classifies each company against our sector theses and flags contrarian gems • Condenses founder calls, comps, and market data into a single dashboard (thanks Draper portco, Otter AI) • Scores deals with heuristics trained on forty years of Draper wins—via a Mappa AI (Draper portco) integration • Creates one source of truth for every company that touches Draper. Every company has one singular record that auto-logs emails, notes, memos, meeting minutes, etc. topped with an AI summary that updates in real time. 10-week results: • Inbox triage: 4 h ➝ < 20 min • Real-time, firm-wide visibility from first touch to term sheet • Interns running dual tracks: deep diligence + fresh AI feature drops • Investment team spending reclaimed hours with founders, not multiple spreadsheets What’s next: • Models that learn why we invest, then surface the next non-obvious founders • A @TimDraper “digital twin” to coach entrepreneurs on our decision DNA • Instant pitch-deck feedback—no more mystery rejections • Smart-match intros across 18 K+ Draper contacts This isn’t a workflow tweak. It’s venture capital rebuilt from the inside out, where internal intelligence compounds right alongside the portfolio. Kudos to @LucasRosillo for architecting the stack and joining us as Draper’s AI Advisor. What should we add next? Drop your ideas below. #AI #VentureCapital #Automation #LLMs #FutureOfVC #DraperAssociates

Congrats to the OpenYield team on the $6M raise led by @levelmarkets Excited to be part of it with @DraperVC Bringing equity-style transparency, speed, and firm pricing to the $150T fixed-income market is exactly the kind of modernization bond trading needs. bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

In 1983, Heidi Roizen and her brother Peter Roizen founded T/Maker. It was a software company built to serve a market that barely existed yet. They started on CP/M and MS-DOS platforms, building digital image libraries. When Apple launched the Macintosh in 1984, they expanded into it fast. Their Mac product, ClickArt, became one of the defining applications of the early desktop publishing era. We backed them through Draper Associates II because a document without visual language looked unfinished, and most people didn't have access to professional designers. T/Maker solved that. ClickArt put a visual vocabulary in the hands of anyone with a Macintosh. What made Heidi and Peter the right founders to back wasn't the product. It was the instinct. The software problem wasn't the hard part. The hard part was seeing which problem to solve at the precise moment the hardware made it solvable. T/Maker grew and was acquired by Deluxe Corporation in 1994. If you're building something the market hasn't understood yet, you know where to find us.

We backed Tesla before the money ran out, before the NUMMI plant, before 8.5 million cars. Here is how we got there. Ian Wright came by the DFJ office and gave Steve Jurvetson and Tim a ride in his WrightMobile, an early electric vehicle held together with PVC pipes and duct tape. It took off like a rocket. Both of them felt like the world was never going to be the same. That feeling led to Martin Eberhard and the first real conversation about Tesla's architecture. Small lithium-ion batteries running in parallel, software that routes around failure so the passenger always arrives. A fundamentally different category of machine, not a refinement of the one it was replacing. We invested. Within a year, the company was out of money. Elon Musk offered to take over management and put in $6.5 million of his own. He persuaded the US government to loan Tesla $465 million, acquired the NUMMI plant from Toyota and converted it, and said the cars were going to be built. He was right. Tesla has now sold over 8.5 million cars. Nearly every major automaker has followed suit. Electric vehicles are now the standard. At Hero City in San Mateo, there's a Tesla Model S chassis that an artist converted into a reception desk. Built-in desk, drawers, and shelving. We call it the Deskla. When Tim told Elon he wanted to build it, Elon said to take a chassis from the factory. The license plate on Tim's truck that day read RISK MR. That plate still fits the story. From a jalopy strapped together with tape to over 8.5 million cars on the road, Tesla is what happens when founders are missionaries about the mission and VCs back conviction before the outcome is clear. That's the only way to be first.

Incredibly excited to be a part of NewLimit’s story. Their commitment to expanding human life is a mission that’s easy to get behind. Their medicine creation timeline has shrank from 10+ years to next year. Proud to be a part of the work that they’re doing! Congrats to Jacob Kimmel and the whole NewLimit team on their Series C.

MONSTER CONTRACT WOW congrats @navierboat

Tim met Ted Leonsis at a Preview Travel board meeting. You know how some people walk into a room and everyone just feels better? That's Ted. In 1983, he had a near-death experience on an airplane. After landing safely, he sat down, and wrote out 101 life goals. All the things he wanted to do before he died. The list included: "#20. Start a company and sell it." "#22. Create world's largest media company." "#40. Own a sports franchise." "#41. Win a world championship." He built Redgate (one of the first technology media companies). He sold it to AOL and joined Steve Case and helped build AOL into what it became. He did well enough on AOL stock to buy the Washington Wizards and the Washington Capitals. Then the Capitals won the Stanley Cup. Write the list. Then go build it.

So excited about my latest investment in education with Edvisor (edvisor.ai)! They're shaking up higher ed at institutions like Berkeley, Duke and 50+ others! The $200B educational materials market has barely changed in decades, and there is an enormous opportunity to transform the industry. When an industry operates as a monopoly or oligopoly and provides poor service at a high price, there is an opportunity for a startup to take new technology and have a forcing function that makes the customer (the student) receive a better service for a lower cost. Edvisor is doing just that.

We're excited to lead Edvisor's Pre-Seed round. They're taking on the dinosaurs of the textbook industry and reinventing learning for the AI-era. Students are paying $150 for a static textbook they barely use. Degrees keep getting more expensive without teaching students skills for an AI-native world. Students and employers are rightly questioning the degree's usefulness. Edvisor (edvisor.ai) is rebuilding higher education for the AI-native world. The answer isn't more chatbots. Classrooms need to be redesigned from the ground up with AI in mind. Edvisor allows courses to be redesigned in minutes. Not weeks. Saves educators a 100 hours per semester and teaches students vital AI-fluency before they even graduate. In just a year Edvisor is live at over 50 universities including Berkeley, Duke, and more.

The best pitch Tim ever heard came from a guy swimming in a pool. 🏊‍♂️ Jim Hornthal, founder of Preview Travel, swam over to Tim in John Goodrich's pool and started talking fast. Tim had to slow him down just to make sense of his ramblings. According to Tim… that's usually a good sign. Jim was building a video/travel company smack in the middle of a time when nobody thought the internet could handle that kind of business. Bandwidth was a massive bottleneck so the idea looked early at best and asinine at worst. Tim backed him. Preview Travel went public in 1997 and then merged with Travelocity in 2000. This is the Draper pattern… Innovation sounds wrong until it's obvious. That window between wrong and obvious is exactly where we invest.

We got about 1,000 applicants for our Hawai’i episode. 🤙 Four made it on stage. Last week, we filmed Season 10 of Meet the Drapers in Kāneʻohe, Hawaiʻi, with the Ko'olau Mountains behind us. Marc Benioff and Chenoa Farnsworth from Blue Startups joined as guest judges and heard pitches from four founders with ties to the Islands: → Miki Hardisty: ʻŌlelo Intelligence, Waimānalo → Kevin Davies: Energy Quotient, Honolulu → Bernard Mendez: Black Sand, Maui → Ioana Cuzmata: G-Space, Sunnyvale Ioana advanced to the semifinals, where she'll compete against roughly 10 winners from other cities. Three finalists will compete for a $1M investment. Three more will be chosen by a global viewer vote. The reason why we decided to go to Hawai’i was summed up by something Miki Hardisty said during the episode, "You can't just have defense and large enterprise and tourism. We need more diversity in the types of businesses we have. Hawaiʻi was built on small business." Hawaiʻi has a real tech ecosystem growing. It's early, but the talent is there, the community is building, and founders like these four are proof of it. "Building a business is not for the faint of heart," Miki said after her pitch. "But you don't have to do it alone." That's the point of Meet the Drapers.