Posts

Martin Hermez spent seven years at Rivian taking energy systems from prototype to production. Now he’s building Brelle in Los Angeles, and Refactor is backing it.

Refactor 5 is a $50M seed-stage hard tech fund. Five funds, ten years, one employee. 100% of Fund 5 came from existing LPs. Backing the hard but not impossible since 2015.

Atoms, not bits. Why 2026 is the most exciting time in a decade to back hard tech founders, and what Refactor looks for at the seed stage in aerospace, energy, bio, and critical materials.

A solo GP's case for staying solo. Why other VCs spend 50-75% of their time on internal management, and why removing that layer means more hours for founders.

The origin story of the Refactor tagline. Why founders started calling Zal "Better Call Zal," and why a phone that's always on is the whole product of a solo GP.

Refactor wrote the first institutional check into The Biological Computing Company. Why the world's first paying customer for biological compute marks a new computing substrate going to market.

Every founder Refactor backs gets free mental health therapy and coaching for their entire team. How the program works, how privacy is protected, and why every seed fund should do it.

Four funds. 100+ companies. Six unicorns. One employee. A short reflection on ten years of backing founders rebuilding industries we'd given up on.

Refactor co-led Hexium's $12M seed in 2024. How laser-based isotope separation revives a Cold War-era technology to produce HALEU for advanced nuclear reactors and lithium-6 for fusion.

Refactor invested in Causal Labs' $6M seed. Why a foundation model for physics — trained on weather — could be the missing piece of AI's reasoning about cause and effect in the physical world.