Draper Associates

The year is 2025. We can land rockets on drone ships. But moving a container from that ship to a train? Still takes 7 steps, 4 vehicles, and weeks of waiting. Glīd is combining trains and trucks aaaaand they won Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt. Glīd just beat out 199 other companies to take home the $100,000 prize and the Startup Battlefield Cup. Here's what gets us excited about this team: Kevin A. Damoa (founder/CEO) spent 17 years in logistics, from loading tanks onto rail as a teenager in the Army to SpaceX to starting Glīd. He knows exactly where the system breaks. The problem? Moving a container from a ship to a freight train involves 7 different steps, 4 different vehicles, and weeks of idle time. It's a $20 trillion market running on 100-year-old infrastructure. Glīd built GliderM, a hybrid-electric vehicle that picks up 20-foot containers and moves them straight to rail. No forklifts. No hostler trucks. No terminal handoffs. They've already signed deals with four short-line railroads, the Port of Woodland in Washington, and Great Plains Industrial Park in Kansas. Now Glīd joins Startup Battlefield legends like Dropbox, Discord, Cloudflare, and @Mint. Congrats to Kevin and the entire Glīd team. This is just the beginning.

Privacy in crypto has always been a paradox. You either accept terrible UX for privacy, or you accept zero privacy for convenience. We invested in Hinkal because they're solving this. The problem isn't just privacy. It's everything you lose when you choose it. Most "private wallets" force you to pick between: → Privacy with limited functionality (store and swap only) → Composability with zero privacy (everyone sees everything) Hinkal embedded privacy directly into your wallet. You stay private across any dApp. No fragmentation. No extra steps. No sacrificing yield while everyone else earns. Privacy that doesn't feel like privacy. This is what the next generation of DeFi looks like.

When we backed Jonathan Chester and the Bitwage team in 2015, most people thought using Bitcoin for payroll was somewhere between "impossible" and "insane." Bitwage spent the last 11 years quietly building something the market is now desperate for: Infrastructure that can pay teams and suppliers across 200 countries in minutes, not days. No SWIFT delays. No 3-5% FX markups. Just blockchain rails that actually work at scale. Paystand just acquired Bitwage. Here's why this matters: Paystand processes $20B+ in payment volume for enterprise customers. They have 1,000+ companies and 1M+ businesses on their network. They've acquired Yaydoo and Teampay. They're building a comprehensive CFO operating system. Bitwage pioneered crypto payroll and serves 90,000+ workers and 4,500+ businesses globally. They figured out compliance, built the rails, and proved the model works. Put them together and you get something the B2B payments world hasn't seen: enterprise-grade stablecoin infrastructure that plugs directly into AR/AP workflows. The infrastructure shift is happening right now. Jonathan spent a decade focused on solving a real problem: expensive, slow cross-border payments. Patience pays off. It took 11 years for the market to catch up to what Bitwage was building. Now regulatory clarity is here (GENIUS Act, MiCA), enterprise buyers are ready, and the infrastructure finally makes sense at scale. Infrastructure beats apps. You can build a thousand payment apps, but someone has to build the pipes. Bitwage did. Congrats to Jonathan, John Lindsay, and the entire Bitwage team. And huge congrats to Jeremy Almond and the Paystand crew for making this happen.

As a trained engineer (and recovering biology student), there's no one we should respect more than the biotech founders looking for new drugs and therapeutics. These are beyond complex systems, with the highest stakes - improving our health. The good news is that the falling cost of AI computation is going to make their work easier - which, in turn, is dramatically changing the fundraising landscape for drug discovery companies. It was great to share some more thoughts on this for Drug Discovery Online - thank you Morgan Kohler for the opportunity! An honor as well to mention the startups and scaleups doing this work so well, including Periodic Labs, Insilico Medicine & our portcos Consensus, Potato, Atomwise, Verge Genomics, Algen Biotechnologies, Ten63 Therapeutics. https://lnkd.in/gHQFpDvc Christian Salem Eric Olson Nick Edwards, PhD Ryan Kosai Abraham Heifets Izhar Wallach Alice Zhang Chun-Hao Huang Christine Du Marcel Frenkel, PhD Mark Hallen

Congrats to Venus Aerospace on the Lockheed Martin Ventures investment! Venus is one of our portfolio companies, and they just announced this partnership at the Axios Future of Defense Summit. They're the only company in the world with a flight-proven, high-thrust rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE). In May 2025, they did something the Houston Chronicle called a "world first"... the first generational leap in rocket engine technology since Apollo. Since. Apollo. The hypersonics market alone is projected to triple to $12B by 2032. Defense primes are paying attention. Startups like Venus are proving that breakthrough propulsion is already happening. When companies like Lockheed Martin start investing in emerging tech, it's validation that the technology works and scales. The next 50 years of defense, space, and high-speed aviation is going to look very different. Proud to back teams like Sassie Duggleby and the Venus crew who are building it.

A novel, scalable area of biotech investment that is growing in interest from family offices and LPs: Gene therapy (sometimes also known as "one and done" gene editing - what a thought!!) One startup in particular to know is Kamau Therapeutics - a great example of what a gene therapy biotech looks like. Their tech can correct disease-causing mutations, replace 'faulty' genes with functional ones, and even insert new therapeutic genes. Truly precision medicine. And is already in use treating sickle cell disease via clinical trials (including one quite close to home and close to my heart as a dad of 2 - the Lucile Packard Children's hospital in Palo Alto). Plenty of other impressive startups also working on bringing precision medicine to the world in various ways via gene therapy/epigentic reprogramming - Algen Biotechnologies, CellCo - The Cell Company, Form Bio, NewLimit - and always keen to hear about others. Still, we need to be patient - lots more ground to cover before gene therapy is available at our doctor's office. But to get familiar with this science, including the setbacks it has faced, I strongly recommend this thorough article from Carolyn Johnson The Washington Post. https://lnkd.in/gyn__UM9

The cat’s officially out of the bag! 😺 I’m so, so proud to share that NLPatent has secured $3M in funding! The round was co-led by Draper Associates and Mighty Capital, with participation from our incredible existing backers - Storytime Capital, The LegalTech Fund, and The51. You might be thinking: “$3M isn’t a ton of money.” You’re right - it’s not. And that’s exactly the point. I’ve always believed in raising the right amount of capital at the right time. Too often, we celebrate big raise numbers without context - no mention of stage, terms, or what the capital will actually enable. NLPatent is different. We raised while hovering around cash-flow positive - a rare milestone for a company at our stage. We didn’t raise to run experiments or throw spaghetti at the wall. We raised to build on a solid foundation, to cement our leadership in patent research and intelligence, and to accelerate a vision we know how to deliver. We were early movers in the "AI for IP" space, which has exploded in recent months! It's exciting times for the whole community!! This round will help us ship more, ship faster, and keep transforming how patent work is done in the AI era. I’m beyond proud of our team, who have each played an important role in NLPatent's success. Their grit, brilliance, and belief in what we’re building made it possible. I'm deeply grateful to our investors, clients, and the broader IP community - the very community I am not only part of but also care so deeply about. 🚀 The best is yet to come!! (Links to media coverage in the comments below!)

Draper Co, Mappa, just made TechCrunch's Startup Battlefield 200. Then they made the Top 20. Then Forbes and TechCrunch both wrote profile pieces on them. All in the same week. The problem they're solving is massive: Hiring is broken. Companies are spending 40+ hours per role doing phone screens. They're missing great candidates because someone had a bad day. They're making gut-feel decisions on six-figure hires. What Mappa does differently: They use voice AI to analyze candidate interviews—not just what people say, but how they communicate, think, and solve problems. It's not replacing human judgment. It's giving recruiters superpowers. The Forbes piece nailed it: "Voice AI Startup Mappa reinvents how teams hire." Hiring teams are stretched thin. The pressure to get it right on the first hire has never been higher. If you're in talent acquisition, recruiting ops, or running a high-growth team, you should be paying attention to what they're building. Congrats to the Mappa team. This is just the beginning.

So far this year, I’ve invested in: - A biotech company reversing aging by turning 55-year-old stem cells back to their 4-week embryonic state. - An open-source robotics company generating infinite synthetic data to accelerate AI model training and deployment. - An artificial womb company redefining what’s possible in reproductive longevity. - A modular, accelerating walkway system building high-speed pedestrian infrastructure for airports and smart cities. - A brain-computer interface startup building bio-prosthetics that restore and enhance motion for amputees. - An infrastructure layer coordinating autonomous vehicles across parking lots to enable seamless pickups, deliveries, and flow in a world where 80% of vehicles are autonomous. - A company reprogramming cells like software to cure all diseases instead of just managing symptoms. - A wearable patch that analyzes interstitial fluid to deliver real-time, at-home molecular insights - especially for those with auto-immune disease. - A reproductive health company using polygenic data to predict and prevent disease before birth. - A surgical robotics company that vaporizes tumors without making incisions. - An mRNA platform that reprograms adult cells back into viable embryos, opening new frontiers in fertility and regenerative medicine. - A robotics startup building the world’s first professional makeup applicator with computer vision engineering. - A company creating the operating system for cells to manufacture next-generation biologics, using AI and synthetic bio. - An algorithm that reprograms stem cells in days instead of months, unlocking scalable regenerative therapies. - A graph-native AI system that simulates biological mechanisms to accelerate drug discovery, testing, and licensing. - A brain cell replacement therapy aiming to eliminate neurodegenerative disease. - The first GMP-compliant synthetic psilocybin company in Latin America. - An AI platform creating autonomous founders that identify problems across the internet, launch products, and generate revenue independently. Every one of these founders & startups is tackling a problem that sounds impossible until it’s inevitable. We’ve been investing across biotech, AI, robotics, defense, aerospace, and deep tech, but the frontier keeps expanding. What cutting edge, frontier tech should we invest in next? #VentureCapital #DraperAssociates #investing