Refactor Capital

Zal Bilimoria is the solo GP and makes every investment decision. There is no investment committee. All pitch submissions go directly to his inbox, and he personally writes every check from the $300 million he oversees across five funds.

Refactor is a venture firm, not a family office. It raises capital from limited partners, not a single family's wealth. Bilimoria founded the firm as a spinout from Andreessen Horowitz in 2015.

Refactor writes $1–2 million checks at the seed stage, typically leading or co-leading rounds for 5–10% ownership. The firm targets roughly 20 investments per fund, focused on hard tech companies building physical products.

Refactor makes direct investments only. There is no fund-of-funds activity. Bilimoria takes board seats or close advisory roles with the seed-stage companies he backs.

Since 2020, Refactor has provided free, unlimited therapy and coaching through Lyra Health to every founder and employee at seed-stage portfolio companies. Bilimoria pays the anonymized invoices from the management company, so neither he nor the portfolio company knows who uses the service. This benefit typically lasts until a company raises a Series A.

Bilimoria exclusively backs companies built on atoms, not bits — physical products like molecules, machines, and materials. He explicitly avoids pure software, consumer apps, and enterprise SaaS unless they are integral to a hard tech stack.

Bilimoria co-led the 2024 Seed because the company's laser-based isotope separation was domestic, modular, and addressed the HALEU bottleneck for advanced reactors and lithium-6 shortages for fusion. The underlying AVLIS technology had been proven decades ago and shelved, not disproven, and the market need was structural rather than speculative (per firm website, 2025).