Latest news with #DraperAssociates
Business Wire
3 days ago
- Business
- Business Wire
Ensemble VC Launches Comprehensive AI Tool to derisk venture capital investments, With Partners Ranging From Sand Hill Road VCs to Silicon Valley's Top Lawyers
AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ensemble VC has developed and deployed a comprehensive system to derisk venture capital investments, with partners ranging from Sand Hill Road VCs to Silicon Valley's most respected law firm. Ensemble co-founder and data scientist Gopi Sundaramurthy spent five years developing 'Unity,' which ranks prospective portfolio company teams based on hundreds of objective data points. Unity then ranks teams — including teams with first-time founders — according to their likelihood of commercial success. Unity can then also help portfolio companies build teams with people most likely to excel in their roles, whether in biomanufacturing, machine learning engineering, downstream processing, go-to-market strategy, marketing and communication, HR or other functions. 'Leading venture capitalists are betting their limited partners' money on AI entrepreneurs. But the VC industry, for the most part, hasn't used AI itself to improve performance across all three major functions of its own industry — sourcing, selecting and servicing portfolio companies,' said Dr. Gopi Sundaramurthy, co-founder of Ensemble VC, former Head of Data Science at the Kauffman Fellows VC Fund, and the first data scientist at IBM Watson Health. 'We decided to tackle the trifecta.' VC firms Draper Associates, Boost, Overmatch and others are already collaborating with Ensemble to use the tool, which can be trained on specific investment niches — from SaaS to military tech, fusion and space exploration. And Silicon Valley's preeminent law firm, Wilson Sonsini, is also using Unity to assess which startup clients to pursue. 'No matter how vast your network, human constraints always limited your network and thus your deal flow and potential,' said Tim Draper, the third-generation VC and founder of Draper Associates (formerly DFJ), Draper University, and the hit TV show, Meet The Drapers. His investments include Baidu, Hotmail, Tesla, SpaceX, AngelList, SolarCity, Ring, Twitter, DocuSign, Coinbase and Robinhood. 'Unity helps eliminate the human constraints.' Derisking VC Unity scrapes millions of points on the Internet — from yesterday's X posts and SEC filings to alma maters, obscure details on LinkedIn, and stock performance on secondary markets — to assess founders, team members and anyone else on an early-stage team. Ensemble's system instantly generates navigable market maps, tracking deep networks of investors, employees, and founders as they move across industries. Unity searches dynamically — by investor, company, geography, and sector — ensuring that the firm doesn't miss entrepreneurs or their seed-stage, high-performing startups simply because they don't yet fit pre-existing patterns. Unity also tracks where talent is moving. The data platform provides a real-time view of technical talent flow, anticipating industry shifts before they materialize. This combination of direct technical experience and proprietary data insights gives Unity users an unmatched ability to spot and back the best companies before the market catches up. About Ensemble VC Ensemble VC is an early-stage investor based in Austin, TX. The firm takes a product-centric approach to investing, leveraging the firm's comprehensive data platform to intelligently and scalably support founders. Ensemble invests early in highly technical emerging technologies that span from AI to defense technology. For more information about Ensemble, please visit
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Billionaire fund manager has a blunt take on US dollar
Billionaire fund manager Tim Draper has a rather blunt take on the relationship between the US dollar and Bitcoin. "Bitcoin might be worth an infinite amount of USD," Draper posted on X on Apr. 1. Well-known for his VC investments in Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter, the Draper Associates founder analyzed the historical trajectory of the USD in relation to the south's Confederate Dollar during the American Civil War. Draper said the Confederate Dollar began 1:1 with the USD, but at the end of the war, it ended with 10 million Confederate Dollars to 1 million USD due to hyperinflation. However, as the USD index dips to its "worst start to the year" in 40 years, faith in the USD may decline "much farther" amid escalating geopolitical tensions, Draper warned. "Bitcoin, on the other hand, will continue to have open and transparent record-keeping and be easy to store," the veteran investor bet on the largest cryptocurrency. "Governments are already hedging against this future by holding Bitcoin in their strategic reserves," Draper said, and added that unlike Bitcoin, gold has challenges such as storage, transportation, and payment mode. In the event of a systemic breakdown, one wouldn't want to rush to withdraw cash from the bank or hoard gold in their room, the fund manager warned. Instead, one should keep "enough Bitcoin" to hold their family for six months to a year, he said. "Bitcoin might last a lot longer" if hyperinflation happens, Draper said. As per Kraken's price feed, Bitcoin was trading at $96,792.82 at press time. It exceeded the $97,000 mark on the day after a two-month lull. Meanwhile, gold hit the record high of $3,500 per oz on Apr. 22. It was trading at $3,232.64 at the time of writing. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
