Draper Associates @DraperVC

Every machine waits for a signal. When it breaks, everything goes blind. We started Offline Protocol by keeping people connected when networks failed. Today, that same technology runs on hundreds of thousands of devices worldwide. Now we're taking it further: resilient coordination for physical systems. Machines, people and AI agents that keep working together over whatever path remains. Where we are today: → 350,000+ devices across 140+ countries → Nearly 20,000 new accounts in August alone → 11,500+ local networks active this month → 60,000+ SDK downloads → 440,000+ location proofs received in the last 30 days → Zero paid acquisition Earlier this year, we closed a new round led by @DraperVC to turn our consumer scale into a rapidly growing enterprise business. Over the past month, we've begun working with partners including a global wind-energy manufacturer, an agricultural IoT provider, a fleet telematics platform, a physical AI operating system, and a data streaming platform, alongside teams in aerospace and satellite systems, embedded silicon and consumer wearables. Our pipeline also spans maritime and industrial monitoring, equipment custody, secure device identity, airline catering and restaurant operations. Wherever machines operate, Offline Protocol coordinates. Learn more at offlineprotocol.com

The internet has no idea who anyone actually is. For thirty years that was an inconvenience. With AI bots now rivaling human activity online, it's the defining infrastructure problem of the decade. Aidan McCarty (@aidan_mccarty_) saw it in 2016, when the civic platform he built with his brother Liam (@LiamHaleMcCarty) got flooded with fake and stolen identities. In 2020 they started Verified to fix it, years before the rest of the market woke up. Aidan joined Brian E. Thomas (@DivergentCIO) on the Digital Executive podcast (@CoruzantPod) to talk through the build. What Verified does: from a phone number and first name, it confirms a real human and autofills verified data in a median of under 10 seconds. No captchas, no document uploads, no losing legitimate customers to the friction meant to catch fakes. 253 million Americans instantly verifiable, 4x growth in the past year, 31% more users converting, and millions of verifications annually across financial services and healthcare. The founders who start fixing a problem before the world agrees it exists are the ones holding the infrastructure when it does.

Absolutely legendary to be on this list. That’s our founder.

Tim Draper @TimDraper

6 days ago

Wow! I am in good company! forbes.com/sites/alexknap…

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Our portfolio company @VincereBio just received a $2.7 million SBIR Phase II award from the NIH's NIDDK to advance its USP30 inhibitor through IND-enabling studies for acute kidney injury. AKI affects over 13 million people worldwide each year, and no approved therapy directly modifies the disease. Vincere's approach clears damaged mitochondria from injured kidney tissue so it can recover. This is Vincere's second organ from the same platform: their lead program, backed by a $5 million award from The Michael J. Fox Foundation, is advancing toward the clinic for Parkinson's. Over $8 million in non-dilutive funding from the NIH and MJFF now validates the science. Congratulations to @Dr_Behrouz, @andy_d_lee, and the Vincere team. 🤝

Hey Marc, welcome to the neighborhood. @draper_u @pmarca a16z.news/p/introducing-…

Bitcoin maximalists will hate this, but leaving Bitcoin untouched is the riskiest thing you can do to it. The instinct to protect the base layer makes sense. But a store of value that does nothing else cedes every other function of the financial system to chains that were only ever experimentation. NFTs, tokens, DeFi, all of it was a testing ground. Ordinals instead of NFTs. Runes and BRC20 instead of ERC20s. The experiments proved the demand. The work now is bringing those functions home to the strongest asset. Bitcoin either becomes a true programmable blockchain capable of replacing the financial system, or it stays a vault while the rest of finance gets rebuilt somewhere less secure.

AI will take everyone’s jobs. ... until they invent new ones. AI alone probably won’t take your job. But someone using AI might. So you should lean in to AI. People react to new technologies in three ways: 1. The Resisters: "AI is ruining everything!" 2. The Ignorers: “I don’t understand AI.” 3. The Adopters: "How can I use this to get better?" It's not AI vs. humans. It's humans with AI vs. humans without AI. We’re not cutting our team because of AI. We’re GROWING it. Our team with AI can accomplish 10x more than our team without it. Businesses without websites died in the 90s. Same thing is happening now. If you're not experimenting with AI in your industry, someone else is. And they're going to serve your customers better. Faster. Cheaper. The buggy whip makers of the 1800s became car mechanics. They pivoted or perished. Which camp are you in?

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We published an article on how we built our own AI infrastructure at Draper to automate every routine task and give our team more time to do the human work in VC. Two years ago, our firm ran on eight Excel sheets. Today, one auto-updated base runs everything: 400+ portfolio companies, 15,000+ contacts, 1,900+ meeting notes, searchable in plain English from a phone. We published the full build log, the 5 decisions we made before building anything matter more than any tool: • Decide where the data lives first. One base, one record per company. Everything else feeds it or builds on it. • Build on infrastructure you already own. Airtable, Zapier, Claude. No new vendors. Fixing something means editing a prompt, not shipping a deploy. • Customize the judgment. An off-the-shelf lead scorer doesn't know your thesis or your passes. • When the system isn't sure, it stops and asks a human. No guessing where the data has to be right. • Document every tool like a shipped product, so the next person picks it up in five minutes. The biggest payoff is the hours it returns to the work only people can do: sitting with a founder, getting to know them deeply, and making the call. Read the whole blog on how we built Draper’s AI stack in the comments.

The USD.infra Vault Is Now Open 🔓 The Internet runs on digital infrastructure. Now with DAWN, that infrastructure is financeable on-chain. Introducing the USD.infra Vault: A new way to finance digital infrastructure powering AI compute and connectivity.

Congrats to Alsa @AisaOneHQ team! As Alsa's early investor, we are excited to see the progress. As GTM become truly agentic by default, Agents can now do the work, not just surface insights, while Alsa provides the tools and data needed to research markets, track competitors, uncover search gaps, understand customer conversations, and identify prospects.

Alsa @AIsaOneHQ

2 weeks ago

Your @dify_ai agent just got a GTM research team. - Similarweb + Ahrefs track competitors - Semrush + DataForSEO find search gaps - X + Reddit read the room - Apollo finds prospects AIsa Go-to-Market plugin is live in the Dify Marketplace. Put it to work 👇

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Our portfolio company Vincere Biosciences just received a $2.7 million NIH SBIR Phase II award to advance its USP30 inhibitor through IND-enabling studies for AKI. Over 13 million people suffer acute kidney injury every year. Zero approved therapies directly modify the disease. In severe cases, 90-day mortality approaches 40%. That combination, enormous burden and empty treatment landscape, is exactly where we want our founders working. Vincere started in Parkinson's, where a $5 million Michael J. Fox Foundation award is carrying their lead program toward clinical trials. The kidney program is the same platform following the data into a second organ. When a team builds on mechanism rather than indication, every new dataset opens another door. Non-dilutive validation from the NIH and MJFF, two programs advancing toward the clinic, and a founding team still following the science wherever it leads. Congratulations to the Vincere team. 🤝

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We’re excited to announce that our portfolio company Cloverleaf Bio just closed a $33 million seed round. We’re proud to be backing the team for the first time alongside an incredible group of investors. @4biocapital, @AbbVie Ventures, @EliLillyandCo, and @Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, @MissionBioCap, and BrightEdge - American Cancer Society. Cloverleaf is a great example of what we look for in Bio-Cure: root-cause science aimed at developing fundamentally better ways to treat disease. The company is building engineered transfer RNA payloads that go after enzymes cancer cells become abnormally dependent on as they proliferate. In preclinical studies, their lead compound stayed active in cancer cell lines resistant to frontline chemotherapy and current-generation ADC payloads, and outperformed standard of care in liver and lung cancer models at substantially lower doses. A Yale spinout, built on foundational science funded by the National Cancer Institute, attacking a mechanism the field took for granted for sixty years. Congratulations to Austin Draycott, Cole Lewis, Wendy Gilbert, and the whole Cloverleaf team. We’re thrilled to be on this journey together! 🤝

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David Zagaynov @DavidZagaynov

3 weeks ago

Announcing Poseidon Aerospace's $60M Series A, led by TQ Ventures with participation from JAWS, Hanwha, G Squared, Starship Ventures, Drover Ventures, and others. At @poseidonaero, we are building the future of air logistics with autonomous cargo planes designed and built from

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Our portfolio company @poseidonaero just closed a $60M Series A, led by @TQVentures. We backed them early and doubled down in this round. Autonomous cargo planes, designed and built from the ground up. Air logistics is one of those categories that sounds too hard until someone builds it, and this team is building it. Congratulations to the Poseidon crew. 🤝

Announcing Poseidon Aerospace's $60M Series A, led by TQ Ventures with participation from JAWS, Hanwha, G Squared, Starship Ventures, Drover Ventures, and others. At @poseidonaero, we are building the future of air logistics with autonomous cargo planes designed and built from the ground up.

Radiant just landed a $750 million contract from the U.S. Army to deliver 15 Kaleidos microreactors, one of the largest contracts the Defense Innovation Unit has issued to date. Five years ago this was a pitch deck. We and @BoostVC backed it when portable nuclear power sounded like science fiction. Now the Army is deploying it across multiple installations, and the operational data from those deployments will accelerate commercial reactors worldwide. Congratulations to the @RadiantNuclear team. 🤝

Draper Associates likes being first to the game. Here's the list of firsts across forty years: First fund to advertise. First to invest in the internet. First to build an affiliate model, domestic and international. First into Eastern Europe. First into viral email (Hotmail). First to fund an electric car company (@Tesla). First to fund a rocket company (@SpaceX). First VC to buy Bitcoin. First human accelerator for entrepreneurs. 🥇

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=UmsXdW…

We backed @colossal when de-extinction sounded like science fiction. Now? It looks like a fertilized chicken egg, cracked open, moved into an artificial shell, and hatched into a healthy chick without ever touching a natural eggshell again. The shell took 14 engineering iterations and the team landed on a hexagonal structure with a permeable membrane that let oxygen diffuse in at ambient temperature. All with a window on top so the embryology team could track development in real time. This matters so much more beyond the chicken. The South Island giant moa stood up to 3.5 meters tall. No bird alive today is large enough to carry a moa egg to term. Colossal needed an artificial incubation system before moa de-extinction could move from concept to reality. This is that system. Now proven. We've watched Colossal go from "de-extincting animals is sci-fi" to 3 dire wolf puppies on the ground. Now they've solved the core engineering problem behind artificial eggs. We invest in founders building the future before it's obvious. This is what that looks like in practice.