Founders COMPETE to THE MAX | Meet the Drapers S9: Semifinals I

Pressure through pregnancy breaks down collagen, leading to a soft cervix and then birth.

Hey, Tim Jr.! We've been all over the world. We have found these entrepreneurs to be in the semifinals.

Be able to compete against the best is always humbling.

We're going to do a set of challenges. There's going to be a winner. I wish you all the best.

This is going to make me younger.

I think I was more prepared. We had a lot of progress since our last time.

I'm Tim Draper. I'm traveling the globe to find game-changing entrepreneurs with world-transforming ideas. Thousands applied, but only top entrepreneurs have made the cut for a chance to win an investment of $1 million. It's a journey packed with unforgettable entrepreneurs. 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 gonna select 6 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 gonna be looking for here?

Oh, thanks for having me.

This is the semifinals, so the stakes are high. The impact, but also how fast they can get to that profitability as well, whether this company's gonna work. But man, so many amazing companies that made it to the finals. So I'm so excited.

On my right, we have Dan Rosenweig.

Swag.

Swag.

Dan's good enough.

Dan's the man. Dan served as CEO of Guitar Hero.

We didn't have the Meet the Drapers song on Guitar Hero, but that would've been great.

It would've been a good thing to have on there. It would've been good. 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.

Yeah.

You've had quite a career.

That's why I'm old.

You're kind of like—

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 2 things together, the world changes.

On my far left here, We've got Satyan Gajwani, and he is the chairman—

Wait a minute, how are you able to pronounce Gajwani and not Rosenzweig?

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. Satyan, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Tim.

What do you think we're gonna 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. Yeah, everyone has a mission.

We all have our mission.

So assured. My team had a competition between today's semifinals and the, the other semifinals that we're going to be filming a little later. So just keep that in mind.

Got it.

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 Katja. 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 8 or 9 hours and wasn't doing something on my business.

So as you can see, you are in 2 groups of 5. So this is semifinals number 1, and this is semifinals number 2. From each, there are 2 winners going forward to the final. However, that changed because we're gonna do a set of challenges. After all the challenges, there's gonna be a winner that has more points. That semifinal, 3 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, I think.

Woo! Thank you.

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 Crafton, 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 U.S. $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 by changing. Pressure through pregnancy breaks down collagen, leading to a soft cervix and then birth.

Hey, Tim Draper!

Prevention tools— prevention tools aim to squeeze the cervix closed.

There he is!

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 3 preemies.

I've chatted with her.

They're all okay, but she pounds them out in 8 months, not 9.

Yeah.

What do you have to do to get 4 From here, which is like you got this new invention, to like FDA approved and—

We're 3 years away from that. We have 2 more rounds of clinical trials to do for both devices, the diagnostic and the treatment.

So you're an RN.

Yes.

That's good for what you invented, but it is not necessarily good for who is the person to run the business forever. Why are you the right person for this? And, 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 master's at Johns Hopkins in biomedical entrepreneurship, um, 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 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?

Yeah.

And how do you set yourself apart from that?

Yeah, so there are other companies out there. There's 3 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.

Thank you so much.

It's great having you.

Good to see 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, and, and then when you break it out by racial discrimination, it just gets worse. And there's nothing more important than, 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 it— 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 app, a power platform that basically analyzes more than 10 satellites every 5 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 supported the response for more than 400 wildfires the last quarter. And every competitor in the industry is hardware-based. They rely on their own satellites, 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 6 months since our last pitch in Buenos Aires, We nearly tripled the ARR. We went from 1 continent to 4 continents. We launched our fire spread prediction model, and we committed $1.2 million of our $2 million pre-seed round in just 3 weeks. And I also did some backflips just in case. Thank you.

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 What are some of your other kind of customers that—

the wildfires, for example, governments?

I think I was expecting the 2 main questions to be defensibility and market, and 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 in 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 the AI models with validated fires. And with satellites, you cannot know what a fire is because satellites detect 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 1,000 users across 19 countries. That database, that proprietary dataset 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 may not be on the top radar of Google. You don't have a moat on the data, and that you said, at least on the satellite side. So what stops other people from building it?

It's the data that we have built over 5 years across different geographies. Yesterday in my room, like, doing backflips, you know, just in case they asked me to do it.

Tim, I thought it was awesome.

Yeah.

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, 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.

Does your face get tired?

For you, the 2025 Future Newsroom. Your goal is to create and perform a 5-minute live All of the founders did such a great job. It's like they never asked why. Okay, that's the task and we have to do that. And that's a real founder mentality.

This just in, the snow leopard is back. Ken, can you hear me?

Yes, I hear you loud and clear.

Hi, I'm here at Frontier Towers interviewing Mario. 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 field.

Let's talk to an everyday citizen right now.

This is my my dear friend here, the snow leopard.

Tell me about how you've honored your place in the community.

Rawr!

Being able to speak is amazing.

And we'll catch you tomorrow, same time, same place. I think the team was great, especially the creative stuff.

We were really vibing with each other. Hello everybody. My name is Kevin DeMoe. 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 an 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.

Wow.

We connect to the, to the earth.

We have a very close race.

One team got 15.5, the other team got 14.

Team 2 wins.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

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 DuBois, 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, dreads, trucks, an army of people, and a lot of capital costs. It takes a unit train 2 to 6 weeks in order to depart, and guess what? They charge you for it. What we've come up with is a very eloquent 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 into 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 the vehicle, that's where the Glider M comes in. So the Glider The Glider Rim goes down the track, it does track inspection for the track inspectors, and guess what? It's real. So we've built 2 Glider Rims. They're actually going to be piloting with our first customer down in Kansas within the next couple of 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 enabler. 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'll 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 So you said there's one that includes a driver and one that doesn't?

Yes.

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 markets will say no. But now I have both sides of the fence. So it's global domination.

All right. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for being on Meet the Drapers.

Tim, it's been an honor.

Congratulations getting to the semifinals.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

All right.

Great, Kevin.

Thanks so much, buddy.

Thank you all.

Cheers. It was so fun to be up there. Great questions. Tim and his crew are always amazing. To 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 gonna make a lot of money because 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 gonna 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 Jaela, co-founder of Illumicell AI, next-generation cellular intelligence platform. Traditional microscopes see cells in 2D, and that means static imaging and no live data. Illumicell 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 So we begin by generating our first immune activation datasets and charging for pilots. Next, we'll license those proprietary datasets 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. 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, Lilly announced a deal with NVIDIA to do exactly that. What I'm trying to understand is why you versus them.

What most companies in 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.

How will that fit in with insurance companies? How do you plan to market this and make that a product that they can get behind?

When it comes to Megan, I think she— her questions were more about understanding how the business would fit in with the existing structures. One of the big pharma companies gave us this statistic: they get pitched about 2,000 ideas, concepts, technologies a year, and then they do pilots with 20 of them. So it's an established process for pharma to make better drugs cheaper. My personal conviction with the AI revolution is that irrevocably AI is going to make early detection and prevention more Well, Jayla, thank you so much for coming and being on Meet the Drapers. It was so cool. Thank you all so much.

Congratulations for making the semifinals.

Thank you.

All right.

It was incredibly valuable to, first of all, see the reactions, and second, to understand what is missing. And that's gonna help us pitch better next time.

A lot of the entrepreneurs we've seen, um, immunotherapy and stem cell therapy are the things that are going after cancer. Cancers now, and we're kind of going from chemotherapies to bio-cures, and somehow we're getting there. This is a little more on the therapy side.

Well, this feels to me that you can find out what it is by looking through it, as opposed to it actually solves it.

Where is the differentiated element of what she's doing? Is it the microscope hardware? Is it the, is it the AI data on top of it? Is it the fact that it's like a real-time video vis-à-vis You know, I, I, I— it was sort of over in a bunch of spaces. For me, it was hard to capture, like, this is what's going to make this really special.

Okay, so let's bring on our next entrepreneur. But before we do, you know what we got to do. We got to see what's going on behind the scenes.

Here at the Frontier Tower, we're building the Intercity Network Society, and one of the most popular floors is the AI left by the builder.

We're going to have a couple of artworks.

You're gonna get inspired by those.

You're gonna come up with a pitch in 10 minutes. It can be anything you want it to be, but you have to present a company idea.

Ready?

Let's do it!

AI floor was kind of the best one, or one of the best ones, that's really evaluating the skills of the founder. Will they succeed or not in building what they build?

We were trying to use ChatGPT to do the challenge. We ended up doing it ourselves like super fast because the team worked super good together.

Ready? Go!

Inspired by lichen, today we're bringing Lycoshield. I love lichens. My favorite piece of art is a lichen from an Argentinian artist. This is an armor with a lichen that is genetically modified in order to be a adhere to the skin and to protect soldiers from wounding at wars.

The shield actually will reform when torn or ripped, will actually heal the skin while reforming the suit.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Chaos is not singular. It involves every single human across the planet, every single organism. Imagine you had a way to pull on those patterns. SpaceThread is a technology that, that takes AI nodes, centralizes that data, and solves for it in real time to identify and isolate those patterns into something that you can actually pull on and secure. The chaos pitch, the pitch about nothing. What do I do with it? So without further ado.

Yeah, it's a tough one, but in this one, We're taking the T2, the team that went first.

Pitching, it's about delivering what you're building, like just explaining. I'm just trying to stay transparent.

Just a single shot of this gene therapy that you also have on your tables, uh, can grow your muscles for years even without going to the gym. But don't put it in your coffee, please. Again, uh, uh, so we developed—

This is going to make me younger?

This?

No, this is bigger.

Stronger?

Stronger, stronger, stronger.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, I'm strong enough. I'm bad.

But for this, you have to travel to Prospera, you know? Yeah, so we developed therapies for longevity and human enhancement with the speed of software, leveraging advantages or special economic zones. With our first gene therapy, we got to market just in 10 months after company incorporation. Since we last time met, we have opened 2 new locations, one of which is just a 2-hour flight from California. Both new clinics have already placed their first orders on total $160,000. Now we are opening 5 more locations across 4 continents. Just yesterday, We got approval for our second gene therapy, the one that you have on your table, and the first time in human history, clinical trial combining multiple gene therapies for human enhancement. We are targeting $18 billion longevity medical tourism market that grows 14% per year. And with it, we find ourselves in the shortest iteration cycle among all biotech. generating so valuable clinically validated IP that can be outlicensed to big pharma, unlocking additional $200 billion biotech partnering market. Let's push humanity beyond biological limits that were given us at birth.

3, 4 years from now, what is the business model?

Yeah, sure. The aim for 2, 3 years to scale it to 100 clinics globally and to keep developing those therapies. If we develop 100 therapies within the next 10 years—

So you're saying if I take this, If I if I were to take this, I would get bigger muscles and not have to take anything for the next few years.

So you'd look like me if you took it? Yeah.

I don't want to look like him. I want bigger muscles. So which is it? Just so we're clear.

So the first one, it builds new capillaries to bring oxygen to our cells and tissues because while we age, amount of capillaries per muscle fiber declines. So it might lead to increase of your like performance. It make you less tired. And the second one, it builds muscle. So that's why we want to combine those two even for. Synergistic effect to grow muscle and make them more functional with those capillaries.

Um, I'm just curious about the side effects, like how is this process possible, first of all? And the second question is, is there a business model like you, you subscribe to? Because this is longevity.

2 questions: side effects and is it worth it?

Yeah, yeah, thank you.

Yeah, sure. So you can see how it works on this, uh, mice. It's 2 similar mice.

What happened to that mouse after?

Exactly, those mice, I don't know, but they Upregulating this gene, folistatin gene, they extended mice lifespan up to 50%.

You're not telling us what's the negative side effect?

Just pain. So far, the one that we have is just pain in place of injection, and that's all.

He was interrupting me always. I wanted to explain to him, I wasn't saying there's no side effects. We don't know side effects. We still don't know because we still have to learn.

What's the differentiator of what you're building?

Yeah, my personal vision that I don't want to be focused on any technology. I believe that the speed, the time, it's the currency of our century. I want to build a system that lets me implement whatever great thing all these entrepreneurs build. I want to be able to implement it in a month. I don't want to wait years, especially in biotech.

Ivan, thank you so much for coming, being on Meet the Drapers.

Yeah, thank you so much.

Congratulations.

Hope to see you back on Prosper.

Many people, they just don't understand what we, what we do. And the world is changing so fast and not that many people can just adjust to it.

US has a lot of regulation and it really is slowing down progress. That's why Prospera exists and that iteration is really important. So maybe this guy's onto something.

The speed of innovation could be so much more if you weren't held back by regulation.

Does anybody know a single medication in the world that has had zero side effects? Nope.

No.

Do I want to back people being able to get healthier? Yes, I do. But do I, but do I want to back somebody who says there's no side effects?

That's the main point.

And I just, I just, I said it's like maybe he doesn't know what this is.

I think the presentation, that's the point.

Yeah, yeah, right.

We're one floor down at the biotech floor with Elliot.

Today you're competing for the coveted Gold pipette.

Wow!

So what you're doing is something called a pipette relay race. Are you ready?

Yeah, I think let's go.

Move liquids from here, from this red container that you have in front of you, into your pink volume, one by one by one, until it changes to yellow. As soon as it changes to yellow, then you need to take off your white coat, put it on the next person. in the round and continue on down the way. You do it as fast as you possibly can, and as soon as you're done, hitting the button first wins the pipette race.

Like, I don't see myself as very competitive as an individual, but when I'm a part of a team, I just like— a new energy comes out of me.

Ready! Pipette!

No, no, no.

Hang on.

Here we go.

Okay.

Yellow!

And take off the tip.

You gotta use another tip.

Ready!

You gotta win for us.

Here we go.

All right, so close.

So close.

We're here in the heart of the lobby.

Oh no.

Let's go, let's go.

Okay, very close.

Yes!

On behalf of the biopunk community and the biopunk lab, uh, the biotech floor here at Frontier Tower, I bestow The golden pipette to the winning team.

Yes!

Let's go! Now we have the 5 entrepreneurs who really have done a great job. 2 of you are moving on to the finale. Galena, Ashley, I think you're sort of like the ideal candidate for something between a nonprofit and a for-profit. You should be able to take donations and you should be able to sell your product, and you shouldn't have the regulations of both because this is really important. I don't even know if I've got another question for you. I just think, hey, do it, solve it.

I'll take a million-dollar donation if you'd like.

You can't though, you're a for-profit.

Otherwise we would have—

you can't. Satellites on Fire, Franco, big problem you're solving. The one question I have is Look, you're gonna have information from all these satellites. And when I said, how do you get to be a $40 billion business? You stuck with fire. Do you think that you'll eventually evolve beyond that?

We are starting with fire because it's an unsolved problem. After fire, we'll go to other catastrophes on the same model that we are working with Aon.

All right. And Glide, really extraordinary what you're doing. The rail-to-truck thing, I've got that settled in my head. The union to automated thing, I'm still a little fuzzy on. How are you going to do that? You said you're going to do both. How are you going to resolve that if you're sending something from Illinois to Tennessee?

There's a lot of nodes, ports, railroads, industrial parks that are non-unionized. That's where we start. We show the possibilities in regards to inefficiencies as well as the capital increases, how much revenue a person can make. In order to pull those other folks in and say, man, I want to do that as well.

Jayla, since it was your first time, it was a little bit less clear where you were going. What was specifically special about your business?

We created unique visualization technology that is simple, scalable, and can be deployed anywhere.

And that's all software?

We moved the complexity of hardware to So we're not producing a microscope with 100 different parts, but 5 parts, super simple.

Unlimited bio. We were having a ball here. Are we either going to live forever or are we going to die of too much muscle?

Which has been my fear my whole life.

In pitching in the future, we're using Prospera so that we can iterate faster. Some of these things are not going to work because I think there was some confusion I'm concerned that you don't have enough concern for humans. But I think you have great concern for humans. You want them to live forever. You called yourself a serial entrepreneur. I don't like backing that because I, I want to back an entrepreneur where this is their life.

About safety, I have concern more than any one of you. In our case, we have to stay even safer than within FDA because if something happens with someone on Prospera, I bring troubles to everyone. The second question, I'm dedicating my life not to this company, of course. I dedicate my life to fight against aging. So I contribute myself to this 100%. And the best way to contribute, it's within Unlimited Bio.

They have to make this tough decision as judges, and then they feed the crystal ball. Satya, you want to start?

Look, I just want to say one thing. We all watch things like Shark Tank and all. You know, this isn't people saying I built a tool to peel bananas faster. You guys are dedicating yourselves to really ambitious missions, and I have to just say, more than anything, that's been the most impressive part of today for me. Every one of you struck different parts of us in ways of exciting us. The one that I was like, man, this is gonna make a ton of money, was Glide. I think that the potential logistics is such a huge space. Second for me was the satellites with fire. To me, that's a huge opportunity if you can actually solve that, and for many reasons, the timing is right.

Megan?

Okay, well, this is amazing. I have to say, I've done, um, other episodes and you can really watch the progression as you get to the semifinals and the impact. I had to make a decision between heart and financial kind of viability, right? And that was the hardest thing for me because Galena Innovations, I think that's really important. I delivered a great presentation. We have a baby Draper To prove it. You're right there.

Being raised by Dan, apparently.

But I do think that as far as viability and the financial part, like we said, the math makes sense. Glide would have to be my number one as far as, you know, financial viability and all of the things, improving every single part of the system. And then the fires was, yeah, my number two because obviously, you know, We've seen that firsthand here in California.

Terrific. Dan, thoughts?

Yeah, so I have a couple of different lenses. Not all of you are the right kind of companies for tech space investors, but I was thinking to myself, are all of you investible? And I think the answer is yes. It's just who you get the money from will make a big difference. But I agree with both of them, exactly the same order, which is Glide and Satellite. The other companies are all investible. And I think some of them need more time or need more clarity. What'd the crystal ball say?

Terrific. We're getting there. Let's just see what happens here, because, I mean, there are some weird things that happen when we start working with the medium and the spirits. Okay, I need everybody's attention here. Satellite's on fire, and Clyde, you move forward. The rest of you guys—

I'm feeling amazing. Feeling absolutely amazing. It feels like a blessing to be able to compete against the best. It's always humbling, you know? Every victory feels different. Yeah, it's wild.

I knew Kevin was gonna win. Like, Kevin was definitely gonna win. So I was like, I just wanna go with you.

I do think that Tim got it, and I think he understood it, but we were too early with our assumptions.

I think Tim really liked us. I mean, if Adam were there, Adam would pick us, like, and— but all judges didn't pick us. It was just one place, and many people were competing for this, but I believe that we had chances.

Another famous Draper, Jesse, wrote an article several years ago called Investing in Women Isn't an Effing Charity. And it's phenomenal. Because people haven't been building things in this area for decades, that it is a space that is ripe for disruption, and it's going to be the next big thing.

See you next time on Meet the Drapers!