Thesis Origins — Fabric Ventures

4 min readDec 5, 2024

Fabric’s DNA derives from the dawn of the Internet and the Web (or Web1). The team originally studied computer science, engineering, and machine learning at university in the early 1990s and before. We built global-scale networking software products with open source before Linux beat Windows.

In Web2, we built firms in distributed computing (or cloud); emergent incentivised networks of machine-learning augmented humans; crawled data as oil for cognitive engines; and backed early innovations in fintech.

In 2013, as Firestartr, we worked with Pantera on Bitcoin investments like Circle, led some of the first ‘proof of reserves’ work with Mike Hearn at Bitstamp; and explored ventures in decentralised music and science to build in our prototype studio.

In partnership with the co-founders of MySQL and MariaDB, we deepened our understanding of open source communities. Our “Developers as Kingmakers” series laid out the power of grassroots hacker movements that have already transformed the world.

Satoshi’s 2009 blockchain was the prototype for the invention of broad-based digital ownership. By appealing to individual sovereignty, tokenized ownership has begun to extend the reach of open source-style remote coordination beyond coding to other domains and to global scale.

By 2016 token economics had found product market fit with the initial coin offering or ICO, and this technology’s potential to deliver entirely new business models became clear.

Following our internal memo and blog ‘The Rise of the Token Sale’ in the spring of 2017, the Fabric brand was launched. We dove into the (at the time) novel fields such as the core metrics defining the health of a network and the sometimes heated debates around value accrual of tokens.

Fabric’s 2017 thesis simply married our excitement with the decentralised power of individual sovereignty to our developer-driven, data-rich and delicious product-first approach.

Concretely this has manifested as a new stack of core technologies: AI, blockchain, and accelerated edge computing. We saw this as a new computing paradigm from which hyper-personalised and contextualised AI-powered application experiences can proactively spring.

When we published our 2021 investment thesis, our investigation of these blockchain-powered applications expanded into five core sectors or ‘olympic rings’: Web, Media, Finance, Health, and Work.

The success of projects such as NEAR, 1inch and Sorare highlighted the maturity of our Open Web, Open Finance and Open Media verticals. The rise of DAO structures and DeSci communities inspired our emerging Open Health and Open Work focus areas.

The ‘olympic rings’ framework quickly became too shallow; by 2023, 5 core verticals turned into 8. Open Finance split into DeFi, payments and commerce. Rapid model layer improvements necessitated a carveout for AI beyond infrastructure, and Open Media proliferated into gaming and content.

With the great progress of YellowCard, OnlyDust and Flowdesk, this year, we returned to one of our original reflections: that an open layer of self-sovereignty can organise the world’s data from the bottom up. Thus fuelling AI to power these verticals in a more complete, adaptable and equitable manner than ever possible with more strictly centralised and closed approaches.

Our work-in-progress 2025 thesis has as its centerpoint these ephemeral, AI-first application experiences delivered to willing participants across a myriad of intersecting use-cases: food delivery; transportation; health diagnosis; personal productivity and so on.

In this vision there is no longer an ‘app for that’ or even an ‘agent for that’ or an app store at all. Step by step the shift to ‘radical markets’ transforms our approaches to payments, commerce & culture. Slowly. Then suddenly.

The digital proletariat of today become the willing, self-governing proprietors of benevolent and safe digital network states that envelope the world. Together we deliver AI that just works. For me. For you. For everyone. We are entering an age when the simple conviction of more individuals than ever before can put a friendly ‘dent in the universe’. And you know what?… it’s gonna be ‘insanely great’.