I'm Tim Draper. I'm traveling the globe to find game-changing entrepreneurs with world-transforming ideas. Thousands apply, but only top entrepreneurs have made the cut for a chance to win an investment of $1 million US. It's a journey packed with unforgettable moments.
Welcome everybody to Meet the Drapers. We've been all over the world and we have found these entrepreneurs to be in the semifinals. We're going to select six that will move on to the finale today. We have Crypto Megan. She is the host of the Crypto Megan podcast. Megan, great to have you here on the show. Anything you're going to be looking for here?
Oh, thanks for having me. This is the semi-finals, so the stakes are high. The impact, but also how fast they can get to that profitability as well, whether this company is going to work. But man, so many amazing companies that made it to the finals. I'm so excited.
On my right, we have Dan Rosen with Swag. Dan's good enough. Dan's the man. Dan served as CEO of Guitar Hero.
We didn't have the Meet the Draper song on Guitar Hero, but that would have been great.
It would have been a good thing. I think we can still do that. It's not too late. It's never too late for a great idea, which is why we're all here. You were also COO of Yahoo and CEO of ZDNet. You have had quite a career.
That's why I'm old. I met a young Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Michael Dell. I know great founders when I see them. So, there's great ideas and there's great founders. And when you put those two things together, the world changes.
On my far left here, we've got Sachin Gajwani and he is the chairman. Wait a minute. How are you able to pronounce Gajwani and not Rosen? I just did the India episode. Chairman of Times Internet and board member of the Times of India Group, largest news media company in India and we've had a long relationship with Times. Sachin, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having me, Tim.
What do you think we're going to see here?
Dude, I love hanging out with entrepreneurs. I mean, for me, the fun of this is, you know, hanging out with you guys is cool, but it's really feeling the energy of the people who feel like they're going to change the world. There's nothing more exciting and infectious than that.
We're changing the world, too. Everyone has a mission. We all have our mission. Tell us short. My team had a competition between today's semi-finals and the other semi-finals that we're going to be filming a little later. So, just keep that in mind. Now, let's bring on our first entrepreneur. But before we do, it's all about the eyebrows. Let's see what's going on behind the eyebrows.
Hi everyone, my name is Katya. We are here at the Frontier Tower in the heart of San Francisco. We believe that the true innovation happens in the intersection of multiple industries. Here under one roof, we have 10 labs that are independent communities. We're going to go down and explore them and go through a series of challenges that you all will participate in.
I can't remember the last time I took eight or nine hours and wasn't doing something on my business. So, as you can see, we're in two groups of five. So, this is semi-finals number one and this is semi-finals number two. From each there are two winners going forward to the final. However, that changed because we're going to do a set of challenges. After all the challenges, there's going to be a winner that has more points. That semi-final, three startups will move forward.
After doing Draper University and survival week, I was expecting anything. So, I just went to Frontier Tower like, okay Drapers, do your magic. The challenges are going to be explained on each floor. There's a floor master. They are independent community builders putting us in different situations and observing us in different situations. I wish you all the best and it's going to be a fun day.
It is hard always when I'm going up against somebody with hard tech that has revenue and you know we're 3 years from market and I knew that going in. I'm Ashley Craftton, CEO of Galena Innovations. After witnessing preterm birth for years as a nurse, my patient showed signs of birth. We sewed her cervix closed, but this tore through and she delivered a baby that was too young to survive. I had to solve this. 13 million preemies are born yearly, the leading cause of death for young children. Survivors face complications and hospital stays costing the US 25 billion yearly. Causes have one shared path. Cervical change. In pregnancy, the collagen-rich cervix keeps the fetus inside the womb. At delivery, the role reverses and it then drives birth by changing. Pressure through pregnancy breaks down collagen, leading to a soft cervix and then birth.
Prevention tools aim to squeeze the cervix closed, but this softens the cervix and can lead to birth. Our unprecedented tools work completely opposite. The ultrasound AI tool finds a soft cervix and the daily treatment stretches the cervix causing collagen regrowth and stiffness. Stiff cervices don't change and babies don't deliver early. In vitro and cadaver work built proof and our human trials safely stiffened the cervix by 34%.
By the way, my daughter had three preemies. They're all okay, but she found them out in 8 months, not nine. What do you have to do to get from here which is like you got this new invention to like FDA approved and we're three years away from that. We have two more rounds of clinical trials to do for both devices, the diagnostic and the treatment. So you're an RN, that's good for what you invented, but it is not necessarily good for how who is the person to run the business forever. Why are you the right person for this? And how are you going to learn how to run a business?
The best most successful companies are always run by the founder. I'm finishing up my masters at Johns Hopkins in biomedical entrepreneurship to strengthen that. But I think the thing that it has taught me is how to work quick under pressure and how to be determined to make something happen. And at the end of the day, I think grit is the thing that drives companies the most.
To me, the question I'm trying to figure out is why is this an entrepreneur's opportunity and not something for like larger medical companies or larger hospital chains and whatnot to be doing?
For whatever reason, it doesn't seem to be something that's on their radar. I think it's one of the underlooked big opportunities out there and one of the reasons why I originally got into this.
Are there other solutions in the market that are working toward this as well? What is some of your competition doing and how do you set yourself apart from that?
Yeah, so there are other companies out there. There's three other companies that are all focusing on compressing the cervix closed like we just talked about. We are the only ones on the market that are actually stretching the cervix to regrow the collagen.
Terrific. Ashley, thank you so much for being on Meet the Drapers. It was great having you. Terrific.
Yeah. Thanks. It was good. I think they all asked very insightful questions that are important to the success of my business.
Women's health has been underinvested in since day one. And then when you break it out by racial discrimination, it just gets worse. And there's nothing more important than allowing somebody to have their baby and have that baby survive. So I'm thrilled that you guys brought her on our show. No matter what happens, this needs to be talked about. I'm just wondering like how far away they are. If they're just beginning these studies and they're the first to do them, how long is it going to take to implement and what is the cost going to be? Is it going to be accessible?
You know, her domain expertise is awesome, but she's not a hardware developer. She's not an AI expert and you know, her passion and commitment is there, but the competence to build what you need for this may be different from what you need to know that it's a problem.
Okay, with that, let's bring on our next entrepreneur. But before we do, got the eyebrows. Got the eyebrows. Let's see what's going on behind the scenes.
I could explain better, I think, in Spanish, but after several pitches, I'm more used to English now. In 2020, I had family friends who lost their houses to wildfires in Argentina. I learned that the organizations responsible for protecting the land only found out because people called 911 in remote areas. So we built an AI-powered platform that basically analyzes more than 10 satellites every five minutes with our own AI proprietary algorithms that are detecting fires hours faster than NASA, alerting response teams immediately and showing them how the fire will spread. We are operating in 19 countries. We maintain a 100% retention rate across 29 paying customers and we support the response for more than 400 wildfires the last quarter and every competitor in the industry is hardware-based. They rely on their own satellite sensors or cameras which is slow, expensive and hard to scale. We connect to all that technology on our AI-powered platform that enables us to detect fires faster than companies that are launching their own satellites for the same purpose, while we scale globally with low operational cost. And over the last six months since our last speech in Boros, we nearly tripled the ARR. We went from one continent to four continents. We launched our fire spread prediction model. And we committed 1.2 million of our $2 million seed round in just 3 weeks. And I also did some M flips just in case.
Your customers, are they insurance companies? Are they governments? Are they families?
So our ICP is the timber companies because we have validated the biggest willingness to pay with the shortest sales cycle.
If we stop all the fires like that, we don't ever burn down the old. How do you create that cycle naturally?
So in the past the wildfires were natural. Nowadays 95% of them are generated by humans. So we cannot leave them spread because there are communities endangered. Of course we have to do prevention and we have to do management of landscape but we cannot leave all the wildfires because if not it happens what happened in LA for example.
What are some of your other kind of customers that the wildfires for example governments?
I think I was expecting the two main questions to be defensibility and market. They were asked several times. Governments are a huge customer segment. For example, we closed a federal government contract with Argentina, implemented the system already in 70 fire departments of the country.
It feels to me like somebody like Google could do this.
They could be doing condoms and they would be on a great business, but they are on ads.
If this is an AI solution, why can't AI companies do this?
We have seen that to build good AI models, we have to train AI models with validated fires. And with satellites, you cannot know what a fire is because satellites see heat. But this heat has false positives and could be industries for example. So we had to build a premium model with more than 50,000 users across 19 countries. That database, that proprietary data set that we have is why we are able to detect fires on average 35 minutes faster than NASA. So we will need drones, satellites, cameras and territory while also sending WhatsApp messages and SMS messages to these first responders so they can go and tackle the fires. I personally don't imagine Google going to drones to cameras and to solving this problem in depth.
This is this perfect balance of being a big enough of an opportunity because we all know what's happening with you know volatility in the climate globally and yet it's a little niche that it maybe not be on the top radar of Google. You don't have a moat on the data that you said at least on the satellite side. So what stops other people from building it?
Is the data that we have built over five years across different geographies.
Yesterday on my room like doing back flips, you know, just in case they asked me to do it.
Tim, I thought it was awesome. I think it's like timing is right. So many perfect macro factors, commoditized satellites and data, AI algorithms getting easy to access. Catching it half an hour earlier makes a massive impact on stopping the fire spread.
And the earth gets hotter and we get more fires and like earth gets hotter, we get more fires. So I have friends from Europe that are looking to move to LA and they said that they can't get fire insurance. Nobody can. It's the right timing. It's a great entrepreneur. He's got a natural passion because he's solving a problem he experienced himself.
Let's move on to our next entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the eyebrows.
We are here on the 14th floor at the Frontier Tower. This is the shoes off floor and this is Mink. We are calling this game the embodied storytelling. So here we will bring out your best embodiment, your best dance moves and your best interpretive movements. So we would need one person each team to be the storyteller and everyone else will be an actor. At some point the other team can call switch which means another person will swap out and continue to tell the story and the judges will judge how coherent the story is and how funny it is.
I think it was intellectual way of putting us in different situations and observing us in different situations and I think all of the founders did such a great job. Once upon a time there was a young man.
One person on the team had to tell a story and the other people had to act it out. And it was fun.
Beginning to sow seeds. Seeds that will flourish and grow.
I don't like this type of things to be honest.
That fantastic food that is Kevin will get because he's superstar.
Now we're in the year 2050 and everything has changed. Mashed really well together. I really thought that the team was very cohesive.
Got us going. Got us comfortable together.
Humans are flourishing into the mouth scene. And we have a second challenge for you. The 2025 future newsroom. Your goal is to create and perform a 5-minute live newscast.
All of the founders did such a great job. It's like they never asked why. Okay, that's a task and we have to do that and that's a real founder mentality.
This just in, the snow leopard is back. And can you hear me? Yes, I hear you loud and clear.
Hi, I'm here at Frontier Towers interviewing Mariel.
We realized we could use this technology to bring back all kinds of different creatures. Came up with this like genetic engineering thing which I really got into and then build whole ecosystems. Let's get into the fields, talk to an everyday citizen right now.
This is my dear friend here, the snow leopard. Tell me about how you've honored your place in the community.
Being able to speak is amazing. And we'll catch you tomorrow. Same time, same place.
I think the team was great, especially creative stuff. We were really vibing with each other. Hello everybody. My name is Kevin De Mo. I'm here with the vibe check. How you doing today, Jayla? Tell me about it.
Everybody remembers the year 2025 when a bunch of apes discovered this prodigious mushroom. Really changed life on Earth. Thank you for bringing this to us today.
Scientist himself, the man that created it. We was built by nature. Nature. So we have to help them back.
If you want to build something like it's not how good actor you are like how good you execute.
How's your pocketbook at this point in life?
I had a great time acting. We touched the grass. We connect to the earth.
We have a very close race. One team got 15.5. The other team got 14. Team two wins.
I think that every time I'm able to speak a little bit about my story on any stage, it's a blessing. And then to be able to compete against the best and then to, you know, meet founders on that same journey is always cool. So I'm Kevin. I'm the founder and CEO of Glide and we're on a mission to make road and rail more accessible. Over the past 70 years, the corridors between road and rail have been extremely broken. Road extremely congested. Rail severely underutilized and the bridge between the two transloading is a process that is off whack for lack of better words. It involves multiple pieces of equipment, trains, forklifts, drayage trucks, an army of people, and a lot of capital costs. It takes a unit train 6 weeks in order to depart. And guess what? They charge you for it. What we've come up with is a very elegant solution. Road and rail combined with hardware and software to unite to synchronize in order to solve the greatest problem that we have, logistics. The top vehicle that we have is an autonomous robotic unit called Raiden. Raiden has the ability to get any road-based trailer, any rail-based cart with little to no modification. And then the bottom vehicle is our manned vehicle called the Glider M. And I'll show you exactly what that looks like. Raiden is a purpose-built vehicle able to get underneath any road-based trailer and then transport it directly on the rails. We are industry agnostic, so we're able to transport either as a solo or the pack. We have a patent for this technology as well, the only patent in the world. Say you're a port and you're worried about unions and you want to put a man in a vehicle. That's where the Glider M comes in. So the Glider M goes down the track. It does track inspection for the track inspectors. And guess what? It's real. So we've built two Glider Ms. They're actually going to be piloting with our first customer down in Kansas within the next couple weeks.
Seems like the real innovation is on hardware. So how do you how do we how should we be thinking about that?
Yeah. The way I think about it, the innovation is in the entire package. So software is our leading horse. I've been doing hardware my whole entire career. So that's the easy stuff. The software piece is the key enablers. So we've combined fleet management with transportation management as well as all the environments that pour into that cost and then made it into a great business model. So we charge a subscription cost for our services. We're asset-based. So traditionally like Maersk or JB Hunt where they you sign a truck, we'll go pick up a load and we'll come back. We do the exact same thing, but we build cool vehicles to serve you. Each vehicle actually comes with financial terms from our contract manufacturer, Custom Truck One Source.
So you said there's one that includes a driver and one that doesn't. So why would they choose one versus the other if the non-driver is more efficient?
Yeah. So unions and speed to market, right? So the autonomous one, I would have to spend gobs of money and it takes a long time in order to get a customer. With my human operated one, I was able to build it, get certification for both road and rail and deploy it all in the same year and generate revenue. But the question that came up was about the unions. Even now I'm thinking about, you know, how do I win the other side over? When the market sees that that transition works, now I can say I can throw in a robot and it can do what that human vehicle can do. And some markets will say yes and some market will say no. But now I have both sides of the fence. So just global domination.
All right. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for being on Meet the Drapers. Congratulations getting to the semi-finals.
Thank you. I appreciate it.
All right. Thank you. Great, Kevin. Thanks for Thank you all.
Cheers. It was so fun to be up there. Great questions. Tim and his crew are always amazing. Be able to talk about our mission and to, you know, explain it to the world in a way that the world hasn't seen it before is always a blessing for us. So happy to be here.
You know, there's great impact, social impact, but there's a lot of money in logistics, and if you can fix this, I think, you know, I can't help but say like you're wearing a part of your hat that's like, is this good for the world? And are you going to make a lot of money? This feels like both, but it also feels even stronger on the going to make a lot of money cuz there's a lot of money in defense and logistics and movement of goods.
I think there's more profitability in this type of industry rather than even the ones that we've seen before because logistics is everything. If you can solve that, you can solve all the major problems.
I love it. When the railroads were connected, the whole world changed. At least the United States of America and the economies changed. This is a new economic revolution in my opinion from a brilliant entrepreneur that also is good for society. I mean, everybody wins here. Terrific. Well, let's bring on our next entrepreneur. But before we do, let's see what's going on behind the scenes.
Viewers, usually I'm pretty easy to reach. I mean, there are only 300 million of you. I'm making it a lot easier for you to contact me. I have downloaded my brain into this digital twin and you can scan this QR code. You can pitch me your idea. You can talk about your business, anything, and I'll answer it 24/7. Enjoy it. It's great. It's a new feature of Meet the Drapers and Draper TV. I think you're going to have some fun.
So, it was my first time pitching the expansion of the business. It felt like having a conversation and I felt very calm and very focused. Hi everyone. I'm Jayla, co-founder of Lumicell AI, next generation cellular intelligence platform. Traditional microscopes see cells in 2D and that means static imaging and no live data. Lumicell AI sees cells in 3D and captures 13 times more data points and our AI analyzes cell movements, interactions and activation which nobody else can do. Tim, you remember us as the sperm testing guys and that's true. We started in fertility and since we last met, we clinically validated our product. It's 99.6% accurate. And now we're bringing that into immune oncology. Immunotherapies work by activating patients' own immune cells to attack cancer. Pharmaceutical companies spend billions each year in clinical trials testing if their new drugs can help trigger that immune response. But with current methods, it can take them up to 12 weeks to understand that. And by that time, 80% of patients will not respond. So for pharma this means billions wasted and trials failed and for patients this can often mean death. So we begin by generating our first immune activation data sets and charging for pilots. Next we'll license those proprietary data sets to pharmaceutical companies and eventually this evolves into a biomarker discovery platform. For pharma, biomarkers mean better drugs faster and cheaper. And for patients, this means finally truly personalized therapies that can help them beat cancer.
What's the thing that others can't do?
It's the hardware itself. It's proprietary visualization technology that we've patented. It's a very simple tech. We moved the complexity of hardware into software. So AI does the hard part. It's like generating images and analyzing them. But the scanner is just capturing data, generating data, which makes it very scalable and cost effective. It can be deployed outside of laboratories or at the point of care, which is particularly what interests the US military applications.
But right now, Lily announced the deal with Nvidia to do exactly that. What I'm trying to understand is why you versus them.
What most companies and biomarkers are doing, they're analyzing something that happens after the reactions take place. So it's not real time, it's just snapshots. And imagine we're taking movies in real time and live streaming it to you versus somebody telling you that this happened and giving you a snapshot.
