Draper Associates

What does Ben Shepherd want Trestle Bio to accomplish?

Ben shares how @TrestleBio is working at the intersection of stem cell biology, kidney organoid science, 3D biofabrication, and regenerative medicine to build functional kidney tissue that could help restore renal function.

Check out the podcast interview with San Diego Connect:
theconnectcurrent.com

Draper Associates has been named to @Inc.'s 2026 Founder-Friendly Investors list!

This one means something specific: Inc. builds the list from what founders say about the investors who backed them.

Our formula has not changed in four generations: back missionaries, not mercenaries.

Fund the wacky and weird before the world understands it. Then get out of the way and let the founders do the impressive part.

63 unicorns and 400+ companies backed, and the part we are proudest of is that the people we backed would say it again.

Thank you to every founder who vouched for us. The credit runs the other way. 🤝

inc.com/profile/draper…

The Tesla Roadster became the second flying car, after our portfolio company Alef.

Alef's release is being picked up by CNN, Reuters, NBC and TMZ.

We backed Jim Dukhovny and the Alef team in 2022, when "flying car" still sounded like scifi to most investors. Now Tesla is entering the category with their recent demo.

We back the wacky and weird before the giants follow.

Congratulations to Jim and the Alef team. 🤝

Watch Alef fly over a Tesla Roadster: youtube.com/watch?v=stmWap…

Mitchell Hsing was a grad student at MIT, still running chip equipment from the 1980s that needed a floppy disk to boot.

That frustration became InchFab: a working clean room inside a shipping container.

The trick isn't cheaper equipment for its own sake, but rather smaller wafers. Four-inch wafers shrink the whole fab down to something a startup can own.

The AI chip conversation points at the leading edge: smaller nodes, bigger fabs, government subsidies. Underneath it sits a quieter category, the chips that will never ship in phone volumes, like sensors, specialty silicon and research devices.

A container-size fab opens chipmaking to the builders those fabs were never designed for.

InchFab started with one grad student who got tired of booting a fab from a floppy disk.

Reuters reports Kalshi is in advanced talks to raise $1B at a $40B valuation, up from $22B in May.

Step back and look at what that number says about the category. Prediction markets were a regulatory punchline a few years ago. Too fringe for serious capital, dismissed as gambling with extra steps. Now the fastest-moving investors in the world are competing to fund them, and valuations are doubling in months.

We backed @Polymarket when that dismissal was the consensus. It has since reached a $9B valuation with validation from ICE, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange. The thesis was that markets aggregate truth better than pundits, and the internet would eventually want a price on everything.

When a category this young starts attracting capital this fast, it isn't a bubble forming. It's the world catching up to what the early builders already knew: prediction markets are financial infrastructure, not a novelty.

The ideas that sound too weird to fund become the categories everyone races into eventually.