Draper Associates is happy to announce the launch of DA8 after spinning out from DFJ 12 years ago. This is Tim Draper's 41st year in the venture capital business, and 12th year since we relaunched the Draper Associates brand with outside investors.

Our strategy remains consistent. We back exceptional, iconoclastic founders early, ones using excellent, deep technology to go after industries that haven't been disrupted in 20+ years.

With our strategy, we hope to help entrepreneurs advance humanity and make massive anthropological leaps forward.

In addition to providing first investments in Tesla, SpaceX, Hotmail, Skype, and Baidu, the team's recent early-stage investment successes include Bitcoin, Robinhood, Iceye, Oklo, Coinbase, Xanadu, Polymarket, and Colossal.

Tim Draper, Andy Tang, and our whole investment team welcome our new limited partners and founders as they join the exciting Draper journey!

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 found a way to make old blood stem cells young again, without gene editing.

Rejuvenation outside the body

HexemBio uses a proprietary synthetic niche, an engineered environment that mimics the conditions where stem cells are born, 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 CTO Samira Kiani and CBO Samet Yildirim. We led the seed, joined by SOSV, Seraphim Space, and Treeo VC.

Why we led the round

We fund the future first, and few futures are bigger than changing how we age, extending healthy human lifespan. The premise is simple: the decline of blood stem cells is a major driver of aging itself. Start with the bone marrow transplant 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.