Partner @drapervc @draperdragon Deal @oklo @colossal @polymarket @iceye @otter_ai @ledger @venusaerospace @cardano @scoutai_ @xanaduai @rigetti @radiantnuclear
Menlo Park, CA
Joined April 2013
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Reserved mine!! Perfect timing, as AI agents are about to do real economic work for us. They’ll watch markets, shop, manage portfolios, and move money. But someone has to make sure a human - you- still have the final say. Great step @_pgauthier , proud to have @Ledger in the portfolio!
Your wealth is digital. The device you manage it with should be built for that.
Meet Ledger Atom™: the security of industry leading hardware, the convenience of your everyday apps, plus control over your AI tools, and a rapidly expanding platform of apps, all in one quantum ready device.
Agents propose. You approve. Your Ledger signer enforces.
andy tang retweeted
Your wealth is digital. The device you manage it with should be built for that.
Meet Ledger Atom™: the security of industry leading hardware, the convenience of your everyday apps, plus control over your AI tools, and a rapidly expanding platform of apps, all in one quantum ready device.
Agents propose. You approve. Your Ledger signer enforces.
Speech recognition was an unsolved research problem for decades, and now a meeting turns into searchable company knowledge without anyone doing anything. @otter_ai has spent ten years making that look easy.
Congratulations to @Goopt and the whole Otter team on $320 million in growth financing from @pranavsinghvi and @generalcatalyst's Customer Value Fund.
40 million users, more than 86% of the @Fortune 500, over a billion meetings transcribed. Otter got in the door as a notetaker. A billion meetings later, what has accumulated is a record of how decisions actually get made.
Where it goes next is agents that can do something with all of it. I’d argue voice has been one of the last big piles of enterprise data nobody had properly indexed... and whoever ends up holding it sits quite close to how a company runs.
Glad @DraperVC is part of this one :)
There’s a lot of talk about cooling VC investment, and I understand where it comes from. But from where we sit, I’d argue it’s still a very good time to fundraise... maybe one of the better ones in years. The capital is there. What’s changed is who it flows to, and how founders need to tell their story.
That’s what we’ll dig into on October 23: I’m joining the panel “Fundraising in a New Era: Navigating Shifting Venture Landscapes” at the @NTUsg Tech Summit & Alumni Conference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, together with @davidyin44 of Informed Ventures, David Hefter of @BlackRock, @LindaKreitzman of @SkyDeck_Cal and moderator Anson Liang of the NTU Alumni Association.
Powering a remote base still mostly means diesel, and diesel means a fuel convoy... one of the most exposed jobs in a war zone. I’d argue that’s one of the reasons portable nuclear is moving as fast as it is.
Congratulations to @DougBernauer, @torishiv and everyone at @RadiantNuclear! That’s all three armed services now: the Air Force at Buckley Space Force Base, the Army at Fort Benning, and now the Navy at Naval Weapons Station Crane.
For anyone who hasn’t seen Kaleidos up close, it’s a one megawatt reactor that ships inside a standard container. Arrives on a truck, runs about five years before refueling, then the whole unit goes back to the factory. No cooling towers, no construction site, no water.
What’s worth saying about nuclear today is that it’s safer by design, built by people who learned from both the promise and the failures of the first era. Three services arriving at the same conclusion within a year really says something about how far that has come. Proud to have them in the @DraperVC portfolio.
andy tang retweeted
The @USNavy has selected Radiant to deploy our Kaleidos microreactor at Naval Weapons Station Crane, Indiana.
With this selection, Radiant is now the only nuclear microreactor company with partnerships across the Army, Navy and Air Force.
The Navy has more than 70 years of safe reactor operations. It wrote the playbook on reactor safety. Earning its confidence is powerful independent validation of Kaleidos.
This milestone moves us closer to our goal: reliable, resilient nuclear power wherever the mission demands. Through our work with all three branches, we’re building a clear path from military deployment to nuclear energy at scale for government and commercial customers.
Read more details here: radiantnuclear.com/news/navy…
ALT A landscape image showing a truck hauling a large container marked "Radiant" across a desert landscape at sunset. In the sky above the scene, logos for "America's Navy," "U.S. Army," and "U.S. Air Force" are prominently displayed.
A strong demographic mix, talented and educated youth, and aggressive government investment... the long-term ingredients in Saudi Arabia are all there.
That was the heart of my fireside with Saeed Alajou of COTU Ventures at @SuperReturn Middle East, on Saudi Arabia's speed and scale. We are proud to have been a long-time investor in the region, and our work with Saudi youth from 2019 to 2024 tells the story: 149 founders supported, 500+ jobs created, $15M+ raised, and 2 Draper-backed companies.
The best part is the people behind those numbers. Watching this generation of Saudi founders and leaders build is the strongest bull case there is.
andy tang retweeted
Two programs kicked off at Draper University this week: Hero Training and the DraperU x @Cardano Apex Growth Accelerator! 🚀
Our founders have arrived on campus, ready for weeks of building, growth, fundraising, and making connections in Silicon Valley.
Excited to welcome our new Hero Training cohort and the Apex Accelerator founders joining us in partnership with @Cardano_CF and @OrionFund!
A few moments from their first week on campus 📸
Welcome to DraperU. Let’s get to work!
Twenty years ago, when I started investing in China, "sovereign data" meant two things: payments and maps. Today the list reads semiconductors, AI, and aerospace. Sovereignty went from a compliance footnote to an investment thesis, and it was the thread running through both of my sessions at @SuperReturn Middle East in Dubai.
On the data and tech sovereignty panel, with @anna_tutova of AI Crypto Minds, Ibrahim AlJallaf of @Inception_42, and Rodrigo Ferreira of Vinthera, my main point: the US-led and China-led ecosystems will each have to reinvent the wheel for every layer of the AI stack, from semiconductors to data centers to models to applications. Two of everything. Which is why I'd argue the world will have more unicorns and fewer decacorns... or, correcting for inflation, more decacorns and fewer centacorns. And the GCC sits in a unique position: one of the few places whose capital is welcome in both ecosystems.
The next day I led an LP/GP roundtable on defense strategy and security, and the room was full, for a topic considered off-limits not long ago. My opening point: @VenusAerospace, @FirehawkAero, @iceye_global... when we backed them at @DraperVC, we underwrote them as commercial companies. Then the geopolitical situation changed, and government buyers showed up. We didn't pivot into defense. Defense came to our portfolio. With many large investors sensing the AI trade maturing, I expect dual-use technologies to be a leading candidate for the next investment narrative.
Thank you, SuperReturn for a great conference, and to my fellow panellists and everyone who joined the sessions.
Some of the best companies we see weren’t started by serial entrepreneurs. They were started by the person who was in the room when the discovery happened and refused to let it just stay paper.
@cloverleafbio is one of those. @a_draycott spent his PhD at @Yale University in the lab of Wendy Gilbert (now chair of Cloverleaf’s scientific advisory board) mapping RNA modifications, a corner of biology most of the industry wasn’t looking at.
That work pointed to an uncomfortable question: what if one of oncology’s oldest drug classes has been working through a different mechanism than we believed for sixty years? In 2025, Austin and his co-founder Cole Lewis left the lab and built a company around the answer. Thanks to Vicky Kuang for her “undercover” student work on the Yale University campus!
As a cancer survivor, I pay a different kind of attention to oncology companies, and what stands out about Austin is his optimism. Every time I call him with what I think is bad news, he explains why it’s actually good news. He always finds the silver lining. Building a new class of cancer therapeutics will take years and plenty of setbacks... that temperament is exactly what the long road requires.
One more thought, for the universities. This science was born in an academic lab and built by a recent graduate. When endowments ask whether venture capital helps their students, Cloverleaf is what the answer looks like: capital flowing into companies built by your own researchers, with the returns supporting the next generation of them.
Every year people ask if crypto conferences still matter. After a week at @TOKEN2049 Singapore, my answer is that the signal has never been better: fewer tourists, more builders, and hallway conversations about products and revenue instead of token prices. The industry grew up.
A highlight of the week was our Rooftop UTXO Pitch Night, hosted by @DraperDragon and the @Cardano_CF at LAVO. I had the pleasure of a fireside chat with my dear friend Hareesh Nair, CIO of TPC, on family offices and family businesses in Asia. One thing from that conversation worth repeating: family offices are true permanent capital. Pensions revolve over time, but families often don’t need the capital back... they want to build relationships across generations. TPC has been navigating cycles since the late 1800s. In venture, we think in 10-year funds and call it long term. That’s a useful dose of humility :)
And then the main event: nine startups (out of 49 applications) pitched live, covering everything from Bitcoin yield and payments to AI agents, digital identity, and tokenized assets, competing for up to $500K in funding. The quality was the real story... several of these teams already have products in market and revenue, not just decks.
Congratulations to every team that got on that stage. Thank you @F_Gregaard, @samizb, @maxime_bucaille, @aalicbarker, and both the Cardano and Draper teams for a great event.
@DraperVC @draper_u
andy tang retweeted
We're pumped to work with the Apex cohort and see the awesome things they deliver from Silicon Valley! 🔥🔥🔥
Meet the 8 teams joining Apex Growth Accelerator 🚀
From WhatsApp payments to AI agents that transact, they’re building the next wave of products on Cardano.
Kicking off today: 10 weeks of building, growth, and fundraising in Silicon Valley with Draper University, Cardano Foundation, and Orion Fund.
Meet the cohort ↓
draperuniversity.substack.co…
@KenomicAI : @raycotarrida @caralvmar
@chatterpay : @tomasdm_eth
@AscentRivals : @realgUbGuuB
@Ospree_io : @JavierTamashiro
@origamitech_ : @korrom18
@NOMADZxyz : @ivan_nomadz @vlad_nomadz
@MentionedMarket : @taylorferran
@MasumiNetwork : @Padierfind