What is The Fabric?

The Fabric, a company co-creator, is a unique approach to inspire, incubate, and invest in the next generation of innovative technology companies that are creating a new flexible and efficient network architecture.

Profound changes in the industry, driven by the proliferation of connected devices, diverse network access mechanisms, speeds and quality, with more and more applications being delivered from the cloud, are creating for stresses on existing networks in existence today. Added complexity of new services and new commoditized hardware platforms coupled with flexible software deployments are creating the need for new technology innovation. The Fabric team believes that this opportunity will create for multiple tens of Billions of dollars in new equity creation in the next decade. The unique focus and structure of the co-creation model will allow The Fabric to meaningfully participate in the success, with a much superior rate of investment return than funding-only models.

The Fabric co-creates, incubates and accelerates the launch of new companies that create innovate and deliver next generation networking products. Markets where we are currently developing next generation networking companies include Cloud network infrastructure, Data Center virtualization, Mobile networks and Security.

The Fabric founding team (Rajan Raghavan, Prabakar Sundarrajan and Sumant Mandal) brings together a unique mix of company building expertise. The team members have more than a dozen startups behind them, deep industry experience of decades of being part of the technology ecosystem: incubating, investing in, being board members of, and successfully exiting multiple startups. The Fabric has also created a strong and deep network of mentors, advisors and co-creators of companies in the industry that give any project under the Fabric umbrella a significant competitive boost.

We believe that our expertise in network the new infrastructure innovation around networking and our understanding of the applicable markets create for a perfect opportunity for will enable The Fabric to rapidly launch a set of market leading highly innovative, well positioned companies in very short order.

The Fabric, which has offices in Palo Alto and in Santa Monica, is structured to align interests of investors, the team and the incubated companies. As part of the incubation process, the Fabric develops the idea with an in-house team, brings in tech talent to help with initial architecture and prototyping, and also contributes technology framework to accelerate development. The Fabric is structured in way that investors participate in both common and preferred stock of the portfolio companies, so incentives stay aligned, and is small and nimble enough to benefit from quick turn around M&A type of exits for projects that it makes sense to explore such an outcome.

This process has already been put into practice with the first such venture, VeloCloud, a cloud networking company currently still in stealth mode (Watch this space for more details on Velocloud.)