“In 2025, Draper Associates celebrated 40-years of pioneering venture capital and spreading entrepreneurship around the world,” read a page about the firm’s history. “With the launch of Draper Associates Fund 8, the team has its eye on the next 40 years.”

A spokesperson for Draper Associates declined to comment.

In 2022, the venture capitalist raised almost $124 million for his seventh fund, according to a filing with the SEC. Draper Associates, which specializes in crypto investments, has $2 billion in assets under management, per the firm’s website. 

The firm’s latest raise comes amid a crypto boom. The total market capitalization for all cryptocurrencies crossed the $4 trillion mark for the first time in history last week as Congress passed legislation that will regulate stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to underlying assets like the U.S. dollar. And Bitcoin has repeatedly notched all-time highs over the past six months, surging past $120,000

Bitcoin OG

Draper, who is 67 years old, hasn’t always been synonymous with crypto.

In 1985, he got his start as a VC when he borrowed $6 million to invest in tech, according to his website. He soon developed a knack for investing in what would become some of the world’s hottest companies. The roster of startups he’s backed includes Skype, Baidu, Hotmail, Tesla, SpaceX, Robinhood, and a host of other successful ventures.

In 2014, Draper made one of his first public splashes as a Bitcoin believer when he paid $19 million to buy 30,000 of the cryptocurrency seized in the U.S. government’s takedown of the notorious black market site Silk Road. The bet, which came at a time when many had written Bitcoin off as a failure, today stands as one of the shrewdest in history. Those coins are now worth around $3.5 billion.

In the following years, Draper became one of the more outspoken cheerleaders for the world’s largest cryptocurrency. He predicted in 2018 that Bitcoin would reach $250,000 by 2022 and, in 2023, repeated the same prediction for the end of that year. The cryptocurrency’s price is still a far cry from that figure but, based on its recent performance, the idea of a Bitcoin being worth a quarter-of-a-million dollars no longer seems absurd.

Draper has also invested in a host of other crypto ventures, including the U.S.’s largest crypto exchange Coinbase, the crypto wallet developer Ledger, and the prediction markets platform Polymarket.