Capital Factory Lands ARK Invest and Tim Draper for Deep Tech Push

Capital Factory has signed ARK Invest and veteran venture capitalist Tim Draper as investors and strategic partners in its All Access 2027 program, a deal designed to wire Texas founders into Florida and Silicon Valley capital.

The partnership connects founders across Capital Factory's Texas network with ARK's ecosystem in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Draper's Silicon Valley venture network. For practitioners, the practical effect is straightforward: one program now spans three regional deal-making hubs.

Capital Factory brings real scale to the table. The Austin-based organization holds a portfolio of more than 1,000 early-stage companies and maintains relationships with dual-use investors, corporations, government organizations, and grant providers. Its venture team and ARK's research organization plan to share deal flow and due diligence under the new arrangement.

The three parties are not strangers. They have previously invested in several of the same companies. Apptronik, the humanoid robotics developer, joined Capital Factory's portfolio in 2017 and is also held by the ARK Venture Fund. Colossal Biosciences entered the portfolio in 2021 after receiving an early investment from Draper.

What does this change for deep tech founders?

Most obviously, geography stops being a constraint. ARK's spARK Labs operates from the 45,000-square-foot ARK Innovation Center in St. Petersburg, and Capital Factory plans to station a member of its venture team at the center to identify technologies and startups across Florida. That puts Austin money physically on the ground in the Tampa Bay tech scene.

The program's focus is squarely hard tech. All Access 2027 will target autonomy, robotics, space, energy, advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, and technologies tied to economic competitiveness and national security. That last category matters — Capital Factory's government and defense relationships are a specific draw for its new partners.

Cathie Wood, founder, CEO and chief investment officer of ARK Invest, said: "Our research led us to Apptronik, where we saw firsthand the role Capital Factory was playing in supporting its growth. This partnership brings our researchers closer to the entrepreneurs building the future and brings Capital Factory's network, including its government and defense relationships, to St. Petersburg alongside spARK Labs."

Tim Draper framed his involvement around Austin's maturation as a founder hub. "I have spent four decades backing them from Silicon Valley, and the last fifteen years watching Austin become a place where a founder with a world-changing idea walks in the door and walks out with capital, customers and talent," said Draper, founder and managing partner of Draper Associates.

A program with a track record

All Access is not a new experiment. The program has worked with approximately 100 high-potential companies annually since 2017, supporting businesses from seed through Series B. In deal-flow terms, that's roughly 800-plus companies shepherded over the program's lifetime.

The alumni list carries weight in defense-adjacent and deep tech circles: Apptronik, Saronic, ICON, Paradromics, Colossal Biosciences, and Firehawk Aerospace have all passed through the portfolio.

Bryan Chambers, president and co-founder of Capital Factory, put the three-way bet in context: "ARK sees platform shifts before the market prices them, Tim has backed category-defining founders for four decades, and Capital Factory has spent fifteen years connecting founders with investors and the institutions that buy from them."

That last clause is the strategic core of the deal. Capital Factory's edge has never been just seed capital — it's the pipeline to government and corporate buyers that deep tech startups struggle to reach on their own. ARK adds public-market research firepower; Draper adds four decades of Silicon Valley pattern recognition.

For founders building robotics, space, or dual-use hardware, the combined network effectively lowers the cost of reaching customers, follow-on capital, and federal contracts simultaneously. Watch whether the St. Petersburg placement produces its first Florida-sourced deals within the year — that will be the signal the three-hub model is working.