We wanted a place to tell our own story, on our own terms, without waiting for someone else to write it. So we built one.

From here on, fund announcements, portfolio milestones, and the ideas we are thinking about will land here first.

We co-led Scout AI's $100 million Series A because the next decade of defense will not be decided by who has the most hardware. It will be decided by who has the best software running it.

The AI brain for autonomous defense

Scout AI is building Fury, a vision-language-action model that turns a commander's intent into coordinated action across fleets of drones, ground vehicles, and unmanned craft, including in the GPS-denied and communications-jammed conditions where today's systems fail. Think of it less as a better drone and more as the brain that lets thousands of them act together.

Founders Colby Adcock and Collin Otis started the company in 2024. In its first year, a team of 34 people booked $11 million in Department of War contracts, unveiled an orchestration layer called Ox, and publicly demonstrated a fully autonomous strike mission run end to end by AI agents.

Why we backed it

We have spent years backing founders who take on hard, unglamorous problems before the market is ready. Autonomous defense is one of the hardest. The round, which we co-led with Align Ventures, was oversubscribed and drew in Decisive Point, Booz Allen Ventures, and a deep bench of defense and venture investors.

“Scout AI is exactly the company this moment demands.”
Tyrone Lee, Draper Associates

Founder Colby Adcock put it more bluntly: this historic raise is a signal to every patriot in Silicon Valley. We agree, and we are proud to help build the brain behind the West's autonomous edge.

Your blood stem cells are the source of your entire immune system. As they age, your body's defenses weaken. We led HexemBio's $10.4 million seed round because the company has found a way to make old blood stem cells young again.

Rejuvenation outside the body

HexemBio uses an engineered synthetic human yolk sac, the same biological environment that produces stem cells before birth, to rejuvenate a patient's own blood stem cells outside the body. The renewed cells are then returned through a standard IV infusion. The first clinical target is blood cancer, where rebuilding a healthy immune system can be the difference between recovery and relapse.

The company emerged from stealth with our round. It was founded by CEO Gabriel Levesque Tremblay alongside a deep scientific bench in Mo Ebrahimkhani, Samira Kiani, and Samet Yildirim. We led the seed, joined by SOSV and Seraphim Space.

Why we led the round

We fund the future first, and few futures are bigger than changing how we age. The premise is simple: the decline of blood stem cells is a major driver of aging itself. Start with the cancer patients who need it most, prove the science in the clinic, and the long-term implications reach far beyond any single disease. That is precisely the kind of audacious, well-grounded bet we look for, and we are proud to lead it.

Every passenger jet you have ever flown shares the same basic shape: a tube with wings. It has barely changed in seventy years. We led Natilus's $28 million Series A because Aleksey Matyushev and his team are finally changing it.

A new shape for flight

Natilus builds blended-wing-body aircraft, where the fuselage and wings merge into a single lifting surface. The result is dramatic: up to 30 percent less fuel burned, half the carbon emissions, half the operating cost, and 40 percent more cargo volume than a conventional plane of the same footprint. Its first aircraft, the KONA, is a regional freighter carrying 3.8 tons. A larger passenger model, Horizon, follows.

Why we led the round

Aviation is one of the hardest industries in the world to break into, which is exactly why almost no one tries. Natilus already has an order book of more than 570 aircraft worth roughly $24 billion, from customers including Flexport, SpiceJet, Nolinor Aviation, and Ameriflight. That is real demand pulling a new airframe into existence.

“The aviation market is ripe for a new aircraft manufacturing entrant.”
Tim Draper

The $28 million round, which we led, takes Natilus from design and demand to building airplanes. As founder Aleksey Matyushev puts it, the company is not just building aircraft, it is reshaping how the world moves goods and people. We could not agree more, and we are proud to be the lead investor backing it.

We led Radiant's Series D of more than $300 million, alongside Boost VC, because the company has done something the nuclear industry has talked about for decades and never delivered: it built a reactor you can ship.

What Radiant is building

Radiant builds portable nuclear microreactors small enough to fit on a truck. The first unit, called Kaleidos, produces one megawatt of clean power, enough to run a remote community, a disaster zone, a military base, or a data center, with no connection to the grid. It runs on TRISO fuel, the most rugged nuclear fuel ever made, goes five years between refuelings, and is designed to operate for twenty.

Founder and CEO Doug Bernauer started Radiant in 2020 after years at SpaceX, where he went looking for a way to power a base on Mars and realized the same problem was unsolved on Earth. The Series D, which values the company north of $1.8 billion, funds the leap from prototype to production.

Why we backed it

Most energy bets are bets on a slightly better version of what already exists. This is not that. Radiant is moving toward its first fueled demonstration at Idaho National Laboratory in 2026 and is building its R-50 production reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on the same ground where the Manhattan Project began. Commercial demand is already arriving ahead of the first unit. We were joined in the round by Founders Fund, Chevron Technology Ventures, the Ark Venture Fund, and Friends and Family Capital.

“Radiant Nuclear just raised $300M+ and we were honored to lead the financing. Radiant's team is both visionary and able to execute, a powerful combination.”
Tim Draper

Clean power that arrives by truck and switches on anywhere is exactly the kind of bet we exist to make.

Patents are where the world's best ideas are written down, and also where they go to get buried. The system for searching them is slow, expensive, and decades behind. We co-led NLPatent's $3 million seed round to fix that.

AI that reads patents like an expert

NLPatent uses natural language processing and patent-tuned language models to do in seconds what used to take a specialist days: find the prior art that matters, monitor competitors, draft stronger claims, and assess infringement risk. Founders Stephanie Curcio and James Stonehill built it in Toronto for the people who live in this work every day, from leading law firms to Fortune 500 legal teams to universities.

Why we backed it

Two forces are colliding: an explosion of AI-generated invention, and a patent system still running on keyword search. The companies that can move through intellectual property quickly will have a real edge, and NLPatent is building the tool that gives it to them. The round, which we co-led with Mighty Capital, funds expansion across North America and Europe and the move from assisting patent work to completing it.

“Our vision is an agentic platform that goes beyond supporting patent workflows to completing them.”
Stephanie Curcio, NLPatent

We back founders who pick hard, valuable problems that everyone else finds boring. The future of intellectual property is exactly that kind of problem, and we are glad to be early.

When GPS goes dark, most drones go blind. We led the extension of Vermeer's Series A, bringing it to $10 million, because Vermeer is teaching drones to see without it.

Vision where GPS fails

Vermeer builds a visual positioning system that lets a drone navigate using up to four electro-optical and infrared cameras matched against map data, running on Nvidia chips, with no satellite signal required. In modern conflict, where jamming and spoofing are constant, that capability is the difference between a mission that works and one that fails. Vermeer's technology is already combat-proven, deployed with the Armed Forces of Ukraine against active electronic warfare.

Why we backed it

Vermeer is an American-Ukrainian company founded by Brian Streem, built quite literally in a war zone. The team has grown from 10 to 40 people, eight of them in Ukraine, and has earned more than 30 partners including the U.S. Army, the U.S. Air Force, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, on top of more than $7 million in non-dilutive SBIR and AFWERX funding before our round.

“One of the reasons we backed Vermeer is the incredible rate of success they've achieved specifically in helping Ukraine strengthen its drone fleet.”
Andy Tang, Draper Associates

Brian says it best: building advanced technology in a war zone is not easy, but it is the only way to make it real. The goal is not just to give drones mass, but precision, intelligence, and purpose. That is a bet we are proud to lead.

The single biggest thing standing between most people and self-custody of their Bitcoin is a string of words on a piece of paper. Lose the seed phrase, lose everything. We led Ryder's $3.2 million seed round to retire it for good.

Self-custody without the seed phrase

Ryder's hardware wallet sets up in under a minute and replaces the seed phrase with TapSafe, a recovery system based on coin-sized NFC tags. To restore access, the physical tags must be brought back together, so there is no single point of failure and nothing to memorize or hide in a drawer. It is self-custody designed for people who are not crypto experts, which is to say almost everyone.

Founded by Louise Ivan Payawal, Ryder raised from a strong group of backers, including angels such as Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.

Why we backed it

We have championed Bitcoin for over a decade, and the next billion users will not arrive through complexity. They will arrive through products that feel effortless and stay secure.

“What the crypto industry needs more than anything right now are solutions that don't require in-depth technical knowledge while maintaining high security standards.”
Tim Draper

Ryder is building exactly that, and we are proud to anchor the round that gets it into people's hands.

A resume tells you what someone has done. It tells you almost nothing about how they will actually perform. We led Mappa's $3.4 million seed round because the company closes that gap with something every candidate already has: their voice.

Hiring based on how people actually work

Mappa analyzes more than 30 vocal signals from a short conversation, drawing on over 100,000 data points in under a minute, to measure the things resumes miss: communication, ownership, empathy, and composure under pressure. For employers the payoff is concrete. Mappa reports more than $30,000 saved per hire and hundreds of hours saved per open role, and already serves more than 100 employers across the United States and Latin America.

The company was founded by Sarah Lucena, Pablo Bérgolo, and Daniel Moretti, with roots in Miami and Brazil. They bootstrapped Mappa to multimillion-dollar revenue before raising a dollar from us, and the seed round was oversubscribed.

Why we led the round

We love founders who prove the model before they ask for capital, and who build for markets others overlook. Latin American talent is some of the most underestimated in the world, and Mappa is building from there outward.

“Resumes tell you the highlights of what someone has done, Mappa AI shows you how they'll perform in the real world.”
Tim Draper

That is the kind of practical, global, founder-proven company we are proud to back early.

Bitcoin is the most secure, most valuable network in crypto, and for most of its life it has been the hardest to build on. We led Midl's $2.4 million seed round because the team is changing that without compromising what makes Bitcoin Bitcoin.

Smart contracts, native to Bitcoin

Most attempts to make Bitcoin programmable push activity off to sidechains, bridges, or separate layers, adding risk and friction at every hop. Midl takes a different path. Its execution environment lets developers build and run decentralized apps directly on Bitcoin, and even bundle multiple smart-contract interactions into a single Bitcoin transaction. No bridges. No detours.

Founded by Iva Wisher, Midl is already live on testnet with mainnet expected shortly, and more than 20 projects are lining up to deploy.

Why we backed it

Our thesis on Bitcoin has never wavered, and the next chapter is about turning the world's best store of value into a platform developers can actually build on. We led the round alongside Draper Dragon.

“It's rare to be this early to something this big. Midl makes Bitcoin programmable in a way that's never been done before.”
Iva Wisher

Being early to something big is the whole job. We are proud to lead the round backing Midl as it brings real software to Bitcoin.

What if the bottleneck on scientific progress is not ideas or funding, but the sheer number of hours a human scientist can spend at the bench? We led Potato's $4.5 million seed round because the company is removing that bottleneck.

AI scientists, not AI tools

Potato builds autonomous AI scientists: agents that read the literature, form hypotheses, design experiments, run them across code and chemistry, and hand back reproducible results. This is not a smarter search bar. It is a research collaborator that works around the clock. The early proof is where it already lives, in labs at MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Caltech, and Berkeley.

The company was founded by Nick Edwards and Ryan Kosai. We led the seed, joined by Dolby Family Ventures, Boost VC, and Ensemble VC, among others.

Why we led the round

We do not say this lightly, but we believe accelerating science itself is one of the largest opportunities in the world. Tim put it plainly when we announced the deal:

“We at Draper Associates believe that accelerating science, and unlocking runaway knowledge production, is a bigger unlock than the internet itself.”
Tim Draper

Every drug, material, and energy breakthrough downstream of faster science is a reason this matters. If software can compress the time between a question and an answer, the compounding effects are hard to overstate. That is a future worth funding first, and we are proud to lead it.

If Bitcoin is going to hold serious institutional money, it needs serious institutional plumbing. We backed Torram because that is exactly what the team is building.

Institutional rails for Bitcoin

Torram is building the infrastructure layer that financial institutions need to operate on Bitcoin: a decentralized oracle network, on-chain data indexing, a security framework, cross-chain tooling, and the ability to tokenize real-world assets. It is unglamorous, foundational work, the kind that has to exist before the more visible applications can.

Led by Vakeesan Mahalingam, Torram was one of just eight companies selected from more than 200 applicants for the inaugural cohort of our BitcoinFi Accelerator, the program we run with Thesis and Boost VC. It went on to close an oversubscribed pre-seed round, which we joined.

Why we backed it

We have backed Bitcoin since almost no institution would touch it. What has changed is the gravity around it.

“We believe in Bitcoin and there's now a gravitational pull towards Bitcoin.”
Tim Draper

Founder Vakeesan Mahalingam sees the same demand we do: serious capital wants infrastructure built to institutional standards. Torram is building it on the most proven chain in the world, and we are proud to have been there from the first cohort.

We have believed in Bitcoin longer, and more loudly, than almost anyone in venture. So when it became clear that Bitcoin was outgrowing its role as digital gold and turning into a platform to build on, we did not want to watch from the sidelines. We helped start the BitcoinFi Accelerator.

What it is

The BitcoinFi Accelerator is a six-week program we launched with Thesis and Boost VC to fund and mentor the founders building decentralized finance, social apps, and infrastructure directly on Bitcoin. Each team gets capital, mentorship, and access to our network, and the first cohort began in November 2024. The goal is simple: find the best builders in the ecosystem early, and back them the day they need it.

Why we are doing this

Boost VC, run by Adam Draper, launched the very first Bitcoin accelerator more than a decade ago. Thesis has spent years shipping real Bitcoin products. We have seen what happens when you back conviction founders before the rest of the market understands the opportunity. Some of our earliest bets, from Coinbase to Tesla to SpaceX, came from exactly that instinct.

“Bitcoin is entering its next chapter as a platform for real-world solutions. The potential of Bitcoin as both a global currency and a technology stack is enormous, and this program will help unlock it.”
Tim Draper

Companies from the first cohort, including Torram, are already building the rails for institutional finance on Bitcoin. This is how we fund the future first: not by waiting for the winners to appear, but by helping create them.

Bitcoin is a remarkable store of value and a clumsy way to buy a coffee. We led Ark Labs's $2.5 million pre-seed round because the team is fixing the second part without breaking the first.

Making Bitcoin spendable

Ark Labs is building on the Ark protocol, a design for moving Bitcoin quickly and cheaply enough to use in everyday commerce, including at the point of sale. Today a simple Bitcoin payment can be slow and expensive at exactly the moments it needs to be fast and cheap. Ark's approach is built to change that, with a payment experience that feels instant and settles on the most secure network in the world. If Bitcoin is going to be money, and not only digital gold, it has to move like money.

Co-founded by Marco Argentieri, Ark Labs raised alongside Fulgur Ventures and Axiom Capital, with angels including Stephen Cole.

Why we backed it

We have said for years that the world is moving toward a Bitcoin standard, where Bitcoin is not only held but spent. That future depends on infrastructure that makes everyday payments practical. Ark Labs is building that layer at the base, and we are proud to lead its first round and help bring spendable Bitcoin to people everywhere.

Bitcoin holders sit on the most valuable asset in crypto, and most of it just sits there. We led Zest Protocol's $3.5 million seed round to put it to work, safely.

A lending market built on Bitcoin

Zest is a lending protocol that lets people earn yield on their Bitcoin or borrow against it on-chain, built on Stacks and the native sBTC peg. It is the first money market for Stacks-based assets, which means Bitcoin can finally function the way other major crypto assets do in decentralized finance, without leaving the security of the Bitcoin economy behind.

Founded by Tycho Onnasch, the Zest team was incubated at Trust Machines and contributed to two of the most important upgrades in Bitcoin's recent history, the Stacks Nakamoto release and sBTC. We led the round, joined by Binance Labs, Flow Traders, and Asymmetric, among others.

Why we backed it

Our conviction in Bitcoin has never been about price. It has been about what gets built on top.

“Bitcoin L2s like Stacks are set to play a key role in unlocking Bitcoin DeFi.”
Tycho Onnasch

If Bitcoin is going to be the foundation of an open financial system, it needs lending, borrowing, and yield that anyone can access. Zest is building that foundation, and we are proud to lead it early.