Technology
Zal Bilimoria just raised its fourth $50 million Refactor Capital fund and continues to enjoy the status of a stand-alone GP
Zal Bilimoria has been a solo complementist since 2018 and has no plans to stop. And he attributes this decision to former colleague David Lee, who co-founded Refactor Capital with him in 2016.
He said he would not have been able to start the Burlingame-based company if it weren’t for Lee, a former Google executive who led Ron Conway’s seed-stage enterprise capital fund, SV Angel, for several years. Together, they raised a seed fund of $50 million. When Lee decided to retire in 2018, he wanted Bilimoria to stay Refactoring as an independent family doctor.
Being an independent GP means having full authority to make your personal investment decisions, while also having full responsibility for things similar to fundraising. And while this level of freedom may sound great, it also means there aren’t any vesting partners to push and force VCs to analyze investment decisions in ways that will not have occurred to them. Even though business angels do that, they spend their very own money. The sole investor invests on behalf of the limited partners, who trust that this person will make their money grow.
“He convinced me to stay on my own, and this was at a time when stand-alone primary care physicians were not in vogue,” Bilimoria told TechCrunch. “He told me that since I loved my independence and power and loved spending time with the founders, I should stay alone. I was very nervous, but the more I thought about it and talked to other people, I realized this was what I wanted to do and I haven’t looked back. If I can help it, I will be an independent GP for the rest of my career.”
Bilimoria will not be without its own unique lineage. Prior to joining Refactor, Bilimoria spent almost three years as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he helped launch the $200 million Bio Fund. Before a16z, Bilimoria spent ten years constructing technology products for tech giants including Google, Netflix, LinkedIn and Microsoft. He was also the founder of the consumer mobile startup Sniply.
With Refactor, it invests in corporations “solving the biggest challenges facing society,” he said. In fact, the term “refactor” comes from computer science and refers to making code more efficient.
Being an independent GP hasn’t slowed down Bilimoria one bit. It has subsequently raised three additional funds and has now closed a fourth fund value $50 million in capital commitments to put money into the biotech, climate and hard tech startup spaces.
Since its launch in 2016, Refactor has invested in greater than 100 corporations, 4 of which have turn out to be unicorns, including Solugen, which uses synthetic biology to remove hydrocarbons from the chemical industry, and Astranis, which produces microsatellites.
Last week, Solugen received approx $214 million loan from the Department of Energy’s Office of Loan Programs to construct one other Solugen Bioforge in Minnesota, which can produce chemicals from corn sugar somewhat than crude oil. DOE award given to a small number of startups made a similar loan to Tesla in 2010.
He added that Bilimoria was able to raise the latest fund in lower than 90 days. Ninety percent of the fund was raised by existing limited partners, including firms similar to Knollwood Investment Advisory. The majority of LPs are institutional investors, and the entire group of LPs are U.S. investors.
“I feel very lucky to have this group of LPs,” he said. “I’ve been chasing one institutional investor for the last four funds and I finally got them into this fund, so they’re part of my new 10%.”
Bilimoria is ending investments from the third fund, but has already committed part of the capital from the fourth fund.
This latest fund will proceed to lead pre-seed and seed investments in startups operating in areas similar to novel battery technologies, cancer therapies, in vitro fertilization advances and chemicals. The checks are typically value between $1 million and $2 million and will probably be distributed amongst 20 to 25 corporations over the next three years, Bilimoria said.
Technology
Department of Justice tells Google to sell Chrome
Welcome back to the week in review. This week, we take a look at how the Department of Justice ordered Google to sell Chrome to break its monopoly, whether OpenAI by chance deleted potential evidence in a copyright lawsuit filed by The New York Times, and the way artificial intelligence corporations are exploiting TikTok for research purposes. Let’s do it.
The U.S. Department of Justice argued that Google should get rid of its Chrome browser to help break the corporate’s illegal monopoly on online search. U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August that Google is an illegal monopoly for abusing its power within the search industry, and the Department of Justice’s latest filing says Google’s ownership of Android and Chrome poses a “significant challenge” to pursuing countermeasures aimed toward establishing a competitive search engine market.
Anthropic raised a further $4 billion from Amazon and agreed to make Amazon Web Services the first training site for its flagship generative artificial intelligence models. Anthropic can be working with Annapurna Labs, AWS’s chip manufacturing division, to develop future generations of Trainium accelerators, custom AWS chips for training artificial intelligence models. Amazon’s recent money injection brings the tech giant’s total investment in Anthropic to $8 billion.
OpenAI by chance deleted potential evidence in The New York Times and Daily News’ copyright lawsuit, say the publisher’s lawyers. As part of the lawsuit, OpenAI agreed to provide two virtual machines so the lawyer could seek for copyrighted content in its AI training kits. However, within the letter, lawyers for the publishers claim that OpenAI engineers deleted all publisher search data stored on one of the virtual machines.
News
Kim Kardashian meets Optimus: The fashion mogul had hands-on experience with Tesla’s bipedal humanoid robot. In videos posted to X, Kardashian encourages Optimus to make a heart out of his hand, dance like he’s at a luau and play rock, paper, scissors. Read more
Oura’s valuation exceeds $5 billion: The smart ring maker has received a $75 million investment from glucose device maker Dexcom. The investment, which constitutes Oura’s Series D financing round, raises the corporate’s valuation to over $5 billion. Read more
Let’s organize a celebration for Partiful: The customizable event planning app challenges legacy solutions like Evite, Eventbrite, and Facebook Events, is a favourite amongst Gen Z users, and was just named a top app of 2024 by Google. Read more
Talk to me in your language: Microsoft will soon allow Teams users to clone their voices so that they can talk to others in up to nine languages: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. Read more
Hackers attack Andrew Tate: According to The Daily Dot, hackers breached a web-based course founded by an influencer and self-confessed misogynist, exposing data on nearly 800,000 users. Tate is currently under house arrest awaiting trial on sex trafficking and rape charges. Read more
What makes a bank a bank? The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has ruled that each one digital services that handle significant volumes of transactions needs to be subject to bank-style supervision, which could impact Apple Pay, Cash App, Google Pay, PayPal and Venmo. Read more
A more conversational Siri: According to sources cited by Bloomberg, Apple is developing a new edition of Siri based on advanced multilingual models in an attempt to meet up with more natural-sounding competitors comparable to Google Gemini Live. Read more
Making Money With TikTok Brains: Several AI-powered research tools are taking advantage of the “PDF to Brainrot” trend, during which the text of an uploaded document is read in a monotone voice against a backdrop of “weirdly satisfying” vertical videos like Subway Surfers gameplay. Read more
Threads attacks Bluesky: As Bluesky’s user base surpasses 20 million, Instagram Threads has begun rolling out a brand new feature called custom feeds to capitalize on user demand for more personalization. Read more
ChatGPT within the classroom: OpenAI has released a free online course to help elementary and middle school teachers find out how to introduce ChatGPT into their classrooms. However, some educators are concerned about this technology and its potential for error. Read more
Do we want one other day by day word game? Normally I’m an evangelist for word games and crosswords, but I feel like we’re quickly approaching market saturation. Netflix has launched a brand new day by day word puzzle game in partnership with TED called TED Tumblewords. Read more
Analysis
Please don’t send X-ray images to the chatbot: People often turn to generative AI chatbots to ask questions on their health concerns and higher understand their health. Since October, X users have been encouraged to upload their X-rays, MRIs and PET scans to the AI-powered chatbot, Grok, to help interpret the outcomes. Medical data is a special category subject to federal protections that, usually, only you may circumvent. But simply because you may does not imply you need to. As Zack Whittaker writes, it’s price remembering that what goes on the Internet never leaves it. Read more
Technology
How the digital “you” can withstand your torturous online conference calls
Now you can appear like you are on a Zoom call in your office, even whilst you’re sipping a margarita in a hammock far, far-off. Courtesy of a several-month-old startup called Marinadethe premise is easy: upload a five-minute training video of you creating an avatar, and 24 hours later you may seemingly be able to go. Do you ought to call from your automotive? This can be your secret. Too lazy to get away from bed? No problem. At the beach club? You’re probably pushing it, although judging by the demo video, that is not the only problem that should be solved. (The service is currently available in Basic, Standard and Professional versions, with prices starting from $300 to $1,150 per yr.)
The technology, backed by Los Angeles-based Krew Capital, currently only works with macOS, Pickle says, but a Windows version is anticipated next month. As for the conferencing apps that customers can pick from, they include Zoom, Google Meet and Teams, in keeping with Pickle. However, you should have to attend to make use of them. According to the website, “due to high demand, clone generation is currently delayed.”
Technology
‘Wolves’ sequel canceled because director ‘no longer trusted’ Apple
It could also be hard to recollect, but George Clooney and Brad Pitt starred together within the movie “Wolves,” which Apple released just two months ago.
On Friday, the film’s author and director Jon Watts said Friday that the sequel is not any longer happening; IN one other interview for Deadlinehe explained that he “no longer trusts (Apple) as a creative partner.”
According to reports, the corporate limiting your film strategy. For example, “Wolfs” was imagined to have a giant theatrical release, but as an alternative it played in a limited variety of theaters for just per week before it landed on Apple TV+.
Watts, who also created the brand new Star Wars series “Skeleton Crew,” said Apple’s change “came as a complete surprise and was made without any explanation or discussion.”
“I was completely shocked and asked them not to tell me I was writing a sequel,” Watts said. “They ignored my request and announced it in their press release anyway, apparently to put a positive spin on their streaming axis.”
As a result, Watts said he “quietly refunded the money they gave me to continue” and canceled the project.
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