Draper Cygnus investment thesis

Tl;dr: The investment thesis of Draper Cygnus to back the best emerging technology founders from LATAM, US, and Israel through Pre Seed to Series A.

This is for their second fund in partnership with Tim Draper and the Draper Venture Network. They invest in supporting extraordinary entrepreneurs who have developed technology and business models that can positively transform our society. Their focus is on –Fintech, Food & Agtech, Bio & Nanotech and Cleantech– in Series A and Seed rounds of the most enabling Argentina-founded companies.

Draper Cygnus investment thesis

Our Thesis: deep tech and decentralization

Deep tech Venture Capital is an essential instrument to create a prosper and sustainable future for humanity.

During the past 20 years, the Internet, Cloud and Mobile eras created an immense opportunity for Venture Capital to back startups building on top of previous technology stacks, focusing mainly on go to market, user experience and growth.

We believe that a number of different foundational technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Blockchain, New Space and Robotics, New Energy and Materials are currently converging and reaching a level of acceleration that will create an immense amount of value and positive transformation in the world, with an equity appreciation estimated in 50 trillions by 2030, equivalent to 5 to 10 times the wealth created over the last ten years by the current technology wave.

Given that public VC backed companies represent more than two thirds of the market capitalization in the tech sector, very attractive investment results are expected for VC investors by the end of the decade.

As a Venture Fund, our thesis is to back those entrepreneurs executing on innovation platforms that are the building blocks of the next paradigms, leveraging deep tech and innovation to shift our society towards sustainability and decentralization.

Expanded vision, expanded scope, expanded team

Following Tim Draper´s vision that entrepreneurial talent is distributed across the world, we are committed to scout the best entrepreneurs throughout Latin America with exposure to both US and Israel innovation hubs.

To achieve this grand vision and create the foundations for a long term legacy, we have expanded the investment team. Valentina Terranova, Arturo Torres and Daniel Salvucci joined the Partnership alongside Diego Gonzalez Bravo and Ignacio Plaza, creating a solid team with common values and a balanced mixture of diverse experiences, youth and knowledge.

Deep Tech

Call it as you like: hard tech, emerging tech, frontier tech, science based. It is difficult to make an accurate definition, why? Because of its own nature, it is changing and evolving constantly and at a faster and faster pace.

To put it in more simple words, our understanding of deep tech startups is as follows:

Companies in their early stages, creating original technologies pushing the boundaries of the state of the art, and building innovative business models on top of them.

So, we invest both in technology risk and go-to market risk.

Some of the reasons we believe deep tech startups propose great opportunities:

1. More chances of generating greater returns
2. They create deeper and long term impact in society
3. LATAM is a huge talent pool in emerging technologies
4. Still underfunded, specially when starting from LATAM

Decentralization

We are in a very special moment of the history of Humanity, one in which the future of our world and species will be defined by the choices we make as a society. This future is binary, we either thrive or collapse. As we are starting this decisive decade of the 2020s, this conclusion has never been so obvious. This is simply not sustainable.

But we are optimistic! As part of our investment thesis, we see an opportunity in applying current and new technologies as tools to reshape how we manage our life on earth and the resources we use.

We believe that the concept of decentralization is a strong driver towards sustainability and can be applied to the most important UN SDGs.

• Decentralized production and consumption of clean energy.
• Decentralized manufacturing and production of food and drugs with new biotechnology processes.
• Synthetic biology creating animal-free protein food, and decentralized farming not depending purely on land.
• Decentralization of population through new ways of governance.
• Crypto and DeFi as tools for the financial infrastructure that is needed for this decentralized world.
• Space technology to better coordinate resources on a global scale.
• As a result of these efforts, the restoration of biodiversity and balance between humans and nature.

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