Draper Cygnus

🛰️ Emiliano Kargieman, founder of Satellogic, on the cover of Forbes Argentina. Emiliano founded Satellogic to improve access to Earth observation data and make it more useful for decisions across areas such as food, energy, and natural resources. Today, Satellogic operates a global Earth observation constellation and continues to grow as a Nasdaq-listed company. We’re proud to have backed Satellogic from its early days and to have it as one of the unicorns in the Draper Cygnus portfolio. Congratulations, Emiliano and team! 🔗 Read the full interview here: https://lnkd.in/dW9hz_xF #Portfolio #DraperCygnus #SpaceTech

Welcome to the frontier, Ab Astra Inc.! 🪨 Every critical minerals decision, where to drill, how to model a salar, how to estimate a mineralized body, is still made on incomplete data. The subsurface has always been, in large part, opaque. Ab Astra is changing that. The company uses muography, a technique that harnesses cosmic-ray muons to generate high-definition 3D models of what lies underground. Their proprietary sensor arrays feed into LUMINA, an AI-powered platform for subsurface interpretation with spatial resolution up to 100x higher than comparable methods. Led by Germán Serrano and Hernán Asorey, both trained at the Instituto Balseiro, the team combines deep technical credibility with real industrial experience. We're proud to participate in Ab Astra's $2M pre-seed round and back Germán and Hernán as they build this from the ground up.  #DeepTech #Portfolio #DraperCygnus #Mining

The hardest moment for a founder it’s not always the product architecture, the business model, or the next strategic decision. Sometimes it’s something quieter: the doubt of whether they’re actually seeing something others don’t, or whether they’re simply wrong. In that moment, capital alone doesn’t solve anything. What can shift a founder’s state of mind in a crisis is having someone close who has seen a similar story before and can say with conviction: “I’ve been in this conversation before. Others were exactly here, and they made it through.” That’s what a fund accumulates over time. Not just returns or portfolio companies, but context, memory, and the ability to support a founder with a real perspective on what they’re going through. At Draper Cygnus, we’ve spent over a decade backing deep tech when almost no one else was. That gave us something that can’t be built quickly: a community of founders who bet on frontier science in geographies the consensus ignored. Each of them went through their own moment of doubt. And in those moments, what made the difference was having someone beside them who could hold the conviction when others began to doubt. @Tim Draper has a line that captures this philosophy well: believing in the founder even when the founder stops believing in themselves. It’s not a slogan. It’s a precise description of what happens when building something difficult requires more than capital: memory, perspective, and conviction. That’s the real asset. #VentureCapital #Founders #LATAM

Meet our heroes 💪🏻 These are four of the founders we back. Aaron Kemmer at Max Space, Rodrigo Diez at Novo Space, Ramiro Olivera at Calice, and Sergio Baron at Dynami Battery Corp. Space, agtech, and energy. Three of the most technically demanding verticals in deep tech, and three where the distance between a real breakthrough and a good story is very hard to fake. Backing these founders is one part of what we do. Staying close is the other. Understanding what they're building, where they're stuck, and what they need next. That's the relationship we're committed to. The portfolio is the clearest expression of a thesis. These founders are the evidence. #Portfolio #VentureCapital #DraperCygnus

Welcome to the frontier, Max Space 🚀 We're proud to announce our investment in Max Space, a new Draper Cygnus portfolio company building the foundational habitat layer for the next space economy. Led by Maxim de Jong, Aaron Kemmer, and Saleem Miyan, second-time founders who have already built and exited in the sector, Max Space builds the habitats where humanity will live and work in orbit, on the Moon, and on Mars, at a cost that makes it viable for the first time. The ISS is being decommissioned by 2030. Nothing at its scale exists to replace it. This technology doesn't just enable access to space. It enables permanence. The round was oversubscribed. The team holds letters of intent with the U.S. government and a strategic partnership with Voyager, a publicly traded American space company. We invested because Max Space represents what we look for: defensible technology, a team that executes, and a mission aligned with where national space strategy is heading. Lunar permanence is sooner than you think🛰️ 🔗 Read the full analysis on our blog: https://lnkd.in/djrwDJaK #SpaceTech #Portfolio #DraperCygnus

Last Thursday we hosted one of our regular dinners with founders, LPs, and members of the DC Mafia🙌🏻 These dinners don't have a rigid agenda and that's the point. The most useful conversations happen when there's no stage and no deck, just people who are building, backing, or thinking seriously about what comes next. This time, we added something to take home: a copy of Breakfast with Pops, Adam Draper's handbook on venture capital. The book fits what these dinners are actually about. Venture capital at its best is a transfer of judgment, not just capital. What gets passed down through a family that has been doing this for three generations isn't a formula. It's a way of seeing. That's harder to teach and more valuable than any framework. 👉🏻 The DC Mafia is built on the same logic. A network that compounds over time because the people in it are genuinely invested in each other's outcomes. Founders who have been through it sitting next to founders who are in the middle of it. LPs who understand the long game. Partners who show up beyond the check. We'll keep doing these. The table gets more interesting every time. Esteban Hernando (Calice), Andrés Mac Allister (The SEMQ Group), Leandro Ciappina (ArgenTag) #DraperCygnus #VentureCapital

Martin Sajon, CEO of /q99, sat down with NYSE Floor Talk to explain what quantum computing actually does and why the time to act is now. Q99 is making quantum technologies more accessible for real-world business challenges, helping companies process fragmented data and solve high-complexity problems with measurable impact. In logistics, Q99 reduced daily travel routes by 225 kilometers for one client, leading to a 25% drop in maintenance costs and a 15% extension in vehicle lifetime📉 This is what we look for in a portfolio company: deep technical conviction, quantifiable results, and a team that understood the opportunity before the market did. We backed Q99 because quantum computing is not just a future technology. For the right problems, it is already an operational advantage. Martín and his team are proving that, not with roadmaps or white papers, but with numbers that show up in a client’s daily operations. Watch the full interview below. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/dvtVb9-W #Quantum #DeepTech #Portfolio #DraperCygnus

Last year Skyloom Global was acquired by IonQ (NASDAQ: IONQ). For us, this is more than an exit. 🛰️ We invested the first check before consensus formed before commercial clarity existed. Before anyone else in the region was having this conversation. Marcos D. Franceschini and Santiago Tempone were building something technically demanding and deeply uncertain: a network of laser optical terminals capable of transmitting data from orbit at speeds that pushed the limits of what was considered possible. We saw the future. Almost a decade later, that conviction materialized into a globally competitive outcome, because the model works: early scientific conviction, deep involvement, long horizons. For founders across the region, Skyloom proves something important. Latin American deep tech doesn't need to adapt to global standards. It can set them. 🔗 Read more: https://lnkd.in/d3FFq4Ei #Portfolio #DraperCygnus #SpaceTech #VentureCapital

Fernando Llaver left his job in Argentina, bet his savings, and set out with a clear conviction: the world’s electrical grids were operating far below their real capacity and that had a fix.⚡ Four years later, Splight has raised $26.5M, operates in six countries, and counts Amazon, Enel, and Acciona among its clients. The company established operations in Silicon Valley and is now engaging in conversations at the highest levels, including the White House. We led their very first round back in 2021🤝 Forbes Argentina sat down with Fernando to talk about the technology behind dynamic grid management, the leap of faith, and what it takes for Latin American founders to build at global scale. 🔗 Read it here: https://lnkd.in/dcAarRQU Watch the interview: https://lnkd.in/d3BP_q_N #Portfolio #DraperCygnus #Energy

We just wrapped our Annual Summit 2026 in San Francisco. The DC Mafia in one room: founders, investors, and ecosystem builders having real conversations about where deep tech is going and who's building it. Latino talent, global ambition. That combination doesn't need a stage to make its case. See you at the next one🚀 #DraperCygnus #DeepTech #VentureCapital