Five-year old accelerator The Fabric focusing on cloud, IoT, 5G continues to build.
Two advisors are joining The Fabric, the five-year old Mountain View, Calif.-based startup fund and “co-creation foundry.” The new advisors are Pankaj Patel, former EVP and CDO with Cisco, and Alan Boehme, CTO of Procter & Gamble.
Launched in 2012 by three serial entrepreneurs, The Fabric is a pre-Series A startup foundry and accelerator that becomes a co-owner and co-creator of the startups it sponsors, to reduce risk to the entrepreneurs and investors.
“The Fabric takes a unique approach of co-creating, funding and launching companies in the cloud and IoT infrastructure space,” according to the fund’s press release.
The Fabric’s executive team. (Courtesy of The Fabric)
Since its launch, the accelerator has raised over $41 million in three pools of capital, each pool called — you guessed it — a Fabric. The current pool, Fabric 3, concentrates on 5G and was funded by Verizon Ventures and March Capital Partners for $15 million, ending up with a total of $20 million in Fabric 3 by April 2018, when fundraising closed. In less than five years, The Fabric has returned seven times its investment.
[Read about more startup accelerators for 5G.]
Rajan Raghavan and Prabakar Sundarrajan started The Fabric after working at Juniper (via the acquisition of Ankeena), So far, the fund has launched eight companies including VeloCloud, Perspica, Appcito, IoTium, Pensa, Spanugo, KMesh, and Rosetta Cyber Security. (At least three were acquired: VeloCloud, Perspica and Appcito.)
Advisory board members include:
- Klaus Oestermann, investor/advisor and former SVP with Citrix
- Gary Gauba, former president of CenturyLink
- Vic Mahadevan, former chief strategy officer of NetApp
- Abhishek Chauhan, VP and Citrix Fellow
- MR Rangaswami, founder of Sand Hill Group
- Shashi Kiran, CMO of Quali
- Pankaj Patel, former EVP and CDO with Cisco
- Alan Boehme, CTO of Procter & Gamble.
