Angel Zach Frankel Reportedly Backs Both Cognition and Rival Factory as the Two Feud in Public

Zach Frankel has spent years staying out of the press. Founders call him "ZF." He is 37, based in Miami, and invests only his own money.

An Oct. 8 profile in The Information put him in the spotlight. It reports that Frankel wrote the first checks into Ramp, Cognition and Applied Compute, and backed Together AI and Modal. It also reports that he is invested in Factory, which competes head-on with Cognition.

That last detail landed in the middle of a public fight between those two companies.

The Degnan dispute

Chris Degnan, a former Snowflake chief revenue officer, was an adviser and board observer at Factory. He joined Cognition as chief revenue officer on Sept. 30.

Factory CEO Matan Grinberg posted on X that Factory had terminated Degnan's roles after learning he had been holding recurring conversations with Cognition executives while advising on confidential matters. "It feels as though ethics is being thrown out of the window in the AI era," Grinberg wrote. He also alleged that Cognition employees faked interviews with Factory to get at internal information.

Degnan says he resigned and told Grinberg he was going to Cognition. "Cognition has never asked about information on Factory, nor would I ever give it," he wrote. He also said Grinberg asked him to consider a full-time Factory role, which he declined.

Cognition CEO Scott Wu denied the accusations. "We would never ask our engineers or anyone on our team to collect info about any competitor under-the-table," Wu wrote. In another post he said: "We have no interest in Factory's info and Chris has never brought it up."

Grinberg's own words on the information at stake: "We do not know the extent of the information he shared."

These are competing accounts. Neither side has produced evidence that Factory information changed hands, and Cognition and Degnan deny it.

The fight spread to investors. Vinod Khosla, whose Khosla Ventures invested in Cognition and led Factory's previous round, wrote on X that Factory was a "struggling second tier competitor" acting out of desperation. His firm's managing director, Keith Rabois, took the opposite side publicly.

The money involved

Cognition announced more than $2 billion in funding at a $48 billion valuation on Sept. 8. Factory announced a $200 million round at a $5 billion valuation on Sept. 15.

The Information's profile describes Frankel as a board member at Cognition, where Wu leans on him for strategy. Ramp was valued at $44 billion in that profile. Crypto Briefing reports that Ramp raised $1.85 billion in October at a $60 billion valuation, and puts the combined value of Frankel's portfolio companies above $185 billion. Neither the Ramp round nor the portfolio total has been confirmed by a company filing in the material we reviewed.

The profile does not size Frankel's personal capital or his stakes. A June 17 SEC filing lists him as a director of Ramp Business Corp. That filing does not establish his private investments in other companies.

How he works

Frankel has no fund and no limited partners. According to The Information, other investors including Elad Gil, Peter Thiel and D1 Capital's Dan Sundheim often follow him into deals. Frankel has described his approach as "capitalism with friends."

His track record goes back years. He was the first investor and a board member at Paribus, which Capital One later bought, with Harvard friends Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh. He did the same at Ramp. He interned at Founders Fund, sat on Juul's board and co-founded Better.com with Vishal Garg. In 2023 he co-started Long Lake Management with CEO Alex Taubman.

He also recruits. According to the profile, more than a quarter of Team USA's International Olympiad in Informatics contestants from 2010 to 2025 have founded, work at or advise companies he backs.

What is and is not tied to Frankel

The scrutiny comes from the structure of his portfolio. An investor who helps place talent and sits on one competitor's board while holding a stake in its rival invites a plain question: whose interests come first when the two collide? Crypto Briefing frames it that way, saying a founder could wonder whether strong candidates are being routed elsewhere.

The documented facts are narrower. No source links Frankel to Degnan's move. The profile notes only that he is invested in both companies, which clashed over the hire. Frankel declined to comment to The Information, and much of the network detail in the profile rests on unnamed sources.

Nothing in the record shows he broke an agreement, shared confidential information or favored one company. No investigation or complaint involving Frankel has been announced.

Angel investing outside a fund also has different disclosure norms. A solo angel does not file the reports a fund adviser does, which is part of why his stakes and board seats are hard to see from outside.

What comes next

Factory and Cognition each say they are in the right, and neither has said it will pursue legal action over Degnan's departure. Frankel has not publicly addressed how he manages his positions in both companies. Whether Factory's board, Cognition's board or either company's investors press him for that answer is the open question.