Clerq

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.

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.

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.