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

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 🚀

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

Welcome back! 💫

When Sci-Fi Becomes Reality: Oklo. What if nuclear power plants could be smaller, easier to deploy, and eventually turn used nuclear fuel into a new source of energy? That was the kind of idea @JacobDeWitte brought to @TimDraper. When Jake was building @Oklo, the timeline alone was enough to make most investors walk away. Tim recalls asking a nuclear physicist friend what it would take to build a new nuclear plant in the U.S. The answer: Five years to design. Five years for approval. Five more years to build. Tim invested anyway. Draper Associates committed $1 million early on. Tim has said the decision was made within an hour. They were betting not only on the technology, but on Jake’s ability to push through an industry defined by long development cycles, regulation, and enormous technical complexity. Draper Associates went on to back Oklo through every round leading up to its public listing. Today, Oklo is developing its Aurora fast-fission powerhouses: compact, metal-fueled, sodium-cooled reactors designed to deliver clean, reliable power. The current Aurora product line is designed to produce 15–75 MW of electricity, with the potential for larger systems in the future. But the reactor itself is only part of the idea. Oklo is also developing technology to recycle used nuclear fuel into new reactor fuel. Conventional reactors leave most of the fuel’s potential energy unused; Oklo says its recycling approach could recover up to 95% of the energy remaining in used fuel while reducing the amount of material requiring long-term disposal. And what once sounded like a distant nuclear vision is moving into the physical world. Oklo’s first Aurora powerhouse at Idaho National Laboratory is under construction. In June 2026, the U.S. Department of Energy approved its Preliminary Documented Safety Analysis, another major step toward operation. Oklo currently forecasts commercial operations at the Idaho project beginning in 2028. The ambition is getting much bigger, too. In 2026, Oklo and Meta announced an agreement supporting development of a nuclear-energy campus in Ohio that could eventually scale to 1.2 GW to support Meta’s regional data-center infrastructure. The best frontier companies don't necessarily make an impossible technology appear overnight. Sometimes they take an industry everyone assumes is too slow, too regulated, or too difficult to reinvent, and ask whether the underlying assumptions are still true. Why it matters for builders: A long timeline doesn't automatically make an idea unrealistic. The more important questions are: 🔎 Has the technology changed? 💰 Can the economics change? 🕚 And is the founder willing to stay with the problem long enough to make the future arrive? That was the bet on Oklo. And more than a decade after the company was founded, the experiment is still moving forward.