Meet The Drapers Season 10 premieres Wednesday, November 25, and DexMat is one of 43 startups selected from more than 1,200 founders who entered! Our episode airs Wednesday, December 30, on DraperTV’s YouTube channel, which means I will close out 2026 – as I closed out many a football season – watching film of myself and wincing.
Meet The Drapers Season 10: The Draper America Tour
Tim Draper has taken his pitch show all over the world, but for Season 10 he brought it home. To mark America’s 250th birthday, the entire season focuses on American founders, with tapings in ten cities from Hawaii to Washington, D.C., by way of Nashville, Detroit, Las Vegas, Austin, and Silicon Valley. Episode 1 opens in Hawaii on November 25, and the whole season streams exclusively on DraperTV on YouTube.
The format rewards staying power. Each city episode produces a winner who advances to the semifinals, three startups advance from there to the final alongside three more chosen by viewer vote, and the champion takes home at least $1 million of investment, with at least $500,000 and $250,000 going to second and third place. That is a serious gauntlet!
The bracket format hits close to home. I grew up on tournament movies like Bloodsport (I still cannot do Van Damme’s splits, despite years of trying.) and The Karate Kid, in which an underdog travels somewhere unfamiliar, sizes up a field of strangers, and has to win one round at a time to earn a shot at the title. Those movies taught a younger version of me that you don’t get to pick your opponents; you just keep showing up, trusting in your training, and doing your best. Pitching Galvorn on a stage in Austin felt closer to the Kumite than to any boardroom I have ever entered, albeit with considerably fewer roundhouse kicks.
Copper, Carbon, And A Camera Crew
In March, while DexMat was in town for SXSW, I stood up in Austin, held up a spool of Galvorn, and pitched Tim and the guest judges on replacing copper with carbon. I wrote about that trip at the time, including the background segment we filmed over a tray of Franklin brisket, but the pitch itself has stayed under wraps ever since.
For anyone new here, Galvorn is many times stronger than steel, lighter than aluminum, as conductive as copper, and produced not by combusting carbon but by capturing it. Materials companies make for unusual reality TV; there is no app to demo and no gadget to unbox, so the spool has to do most of the talking – which, in my experience, it does very well.
Tim also has a habit of being early. Draper Fisher Jurvetson invested in Tesla’s Series C back in 2006, and Draper Associates counts SpaceX, Skype, and Coinbase among its early bets. If you have ever wondered what it looks like to pitch a materials company to the investor whose firm backed Tesla and SpaceX before most people had heard of them, mark the date.
Hero Or Villain?
I have not seen the edit yet, so I will find out whether the producers made me a hero or a villain at the same time you do . . . Every football player knows the Monday film session where the coach rewinds your missed block six times in front of the whole team; this time the whole team is the Internet. Moreover, back in August I published my climatetech pitch tips for New York Climate Week, so December 30 doubles as a public test of whether I practice what I preach.
Until the episode airs, I can’t share how it turned out, so if you ask me at a holiday party, expect me to hand you the spool and change the subject.
How To Watch
- Season 10 premiere: Wednesday, November 25, 2026 (Episode 1, Hawaii)
- DexMat’s episode: Wednesday, December 30, 2026 (Episode 6, Austin)
- Where: DraperTV on YouTube
Thank you to Tim Draper and the DraperTV team for the opportunity, and to the whole DexMat team, who are in this episode whether or not they made it on camera! The spool I held up in Austin was spun by DexMates in Houston, and every milestone behind that pitch, from our oversubscribed seed round to our first multi-year offtake agreement, belongs to them.
I will see you on December 30! 🚀