It’s official. @DraperDragon $80m @OrionFund is open for business. And Draper University is leading the programs that help find and uplift the earliest builders. The fund is built to turn Cardano's technical leadership into global, venture-scaled growth. We are searching for the founders who will drive the next $3b in TVL. > tier 1 first VC check (up to $90k) > elite programming > investor networking > free housing in Silicon Valley > leverage the massive Draper ecosystem in web3 Applications for our first cohort are now open. Link below 👇. @Cardano_CF @Cardano

DraperU × @Cardano Apex Growth Accelerator is off to a strong start! 💪

What’s one industry you can’t believe still works the way it does? What would you change first and why? Share your thoughts in the comments👇

BEFORE IT WAS OBVIOUS: DOCUSIGN Today, signing a contract from your phone feels completely normal. In the early 2000s, it didn’t. Agreements still moved through printers, scanners, fax machines, couriers, and email attachments. The workflow was slow, but familiar enough that most people accepted it as simply how business worked. @DocuSign’s bet was that the signature itself could become digital infrastructure: send a document, sign it securely from anywhere, and keep the entire agreement process online. That sounds obvious now precisely because the behavior became so universal. But replacing paper wasn’t just a product problem. The company had to overcome habits, security concerns, legal questions, and the simple inertia of a process businesses had used for decades. @DraperVC and @TimDraper backed DocuSign as part of a portfolio built around technologies that challenged entrenched ways of doing things. Today, DocuSign has become synonymous with electronic signatures and expanded far beyond signing into broader agreement management. Why it matters for builders: innovation doesn’t always require inventing a completely new behavior. Sometimes the opportunity is hiding inside a process everyone already uses – but nobody has bothered to make dramatically easier. The fact that people tolerate friction doesn’t mean they want it.

Two founders from the DraperU Ventures portfolio made it onto Payload’s 2026 Pioneers list. 🚀 Congratulations to Muhammad Hunain, founder of Melagen Labs, and Anna Shaposhnik, founder of ORBES! Muhammad is developing radiation shielding and testing infrastructure to help spacecraft withstand harsh environments. Anna is building autonomous space robots for filming and inspection. Different challenges with a shared ambition to make more possible in space. We’re proud to back founders building the infrastructure the next space economy will need. Meet the 2026 Payload Pioneers: payloadspace.com/category/pa…

Great to see the founders of our DraperU x @Cardano Apex Growth Accelerator making the most of their Silicon Valley experience!

You learn a lot about your cofounder when you’re both pushed outside your comfort zone. 💪 Proud of the @KenomicAI team for taking on Survival Weekend together. Now back to building!

Draper University at @TechCrunch Disrupt! 🚀 Our team, Tessa and Shajeha, spent time connecting with investors, founders, and ecosystem partners at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. From meeting new investors to exploring opportunities for our upcoming VC dinners, we're excited to keep building connections across the startup ecosystem. Great to see the DraperU team out there making things happen!

Space is becoming infrastructure. Years ago, @TimDraper and the Draper ecosystem backed @SpaceX early, when private space transportation itself was still a radical idea. At the time, one of the biggest challenges in commercial space was simply getting to orbit reliably and at a lower cost. SpaceX helped change the economics of launch and made access to orbit dramatically more frequent and reusable. That progress created a new set of problems and opportunities. Once getting to space is no longer the only challenge, the question becomes what happens after launch. How do spacecraft move once they’re there? Where do payloads live? How do we protect orbital assets, inspect them, repair them, and keep them operating for longer? That is the shift we’re watching now. The next generation of space companies isn’t only building rockets. They’re building the systems, platforms, services, and infrastructure required for an actual economy to function beyond Earth. Across the Draper University Ventures portfolio, founders are already working on different pieces of that future. The first era of commercial space was about access. The next is about what we build with it.

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!

Good luck, team! 🔥 This is going to be an incredible experience! Can’t wait to hear all the stories when you’re back!

BEFORE IT WAS OBVIOUS: @coinbase. You can be wrong about the market and right about the founder. @TimDraper almost missed Coinbase. In his account, @brian_armstrong originally pitched Coinbase to Joel Yarmon and Tim. Draper liked Armstrong, but the firm had already invested in CoinLab, a Bitcoin exchange focused on institutional investors. They made a strategic judgment: Coinbase was going after retail consumers, and they thought that route would take too long. So Draper passed. His son @AdamDraper saw it differently. Adam Draper met Brian separately and wrote Coinbase his first check. Then the market started answering the question. Coinbase grew, consumer adoption accelerated. Crypto moved far beyond the relatively small audience that existed when the company was founded. And when Coinbase raised another round, Draper Associates invested. Tim writes that the Coinbase investment ultimately returned nearly twice the size of an entire Draper Associates fund. There’s an important lesson buried in the part of the story where they were initially wrong. The team correctly recognized Brian Armstrong as exceptional, but underestimated the path he had chosen. Why it matters for builders: investors can be wrong about your market timing, your customer, or even your entire strategy while still recognizing something unusual in you. And investors should remember the inverse: sometimes the unconventional go-to-market strategy is exactly what creates the enormous market. Retail crypto looked like the longer road, yet it became the road to mass adoption.

Let's go!!!

Crypto is making a comeback. More builders, real products, and conversations about revenue.

How much useful AI are you actually getting from your GPUs? DraperU Ventures portfolio company Tensor Machines has launched TensorBench, an open-source benchmark that helps operators measure the real cost of running AI. Think of it as a fuel-efficiency test for AI hardware. It runs AI workloads, tracks power consumption and performance, and measures how much useful output the hardware produces while meeting requirements like response speed. Why does this matter? GPUs are expensive, electricity costs add up, and identical hardware doesn’t always deliver identical results. Knowing which workloads and power settings work best can help operators get more from the infrastructure they already own. In early tests, the fastest GPU result delivered nearly 15% more tokens per second than the slowest result from the same model on one inference workload. In another comparison, 36% more power delivered just 21% more compute throughput. Those differences affect how much every AI response costs to produce. The team also announced a $1.5M pre-seed round led by Omni VC, with participation from Reinforced Ventures, Avesta Fund and DraperU Ventures. Congratulations to founders Muneeb Rasool, Mohamed Abdalla, and the Tensor Machines team! 🚀 Explore TensorBench: prnewswire.com/news-releases…

Welcome to campus, @KenomicAI! Excited to have you in our Apex cohort. Here’s to 10 weeks of building, learning, and growing together in Silicon Valley 🚀