InfiniBand startup Fabric Networks Inc. -- formerly known as InfiniSwitch -- shut its doors yesterday and laid off most of its employees after it failed to find traction, CEO and president Alisa Nessler tells Byte and Switch in an exclusive interview.
The Westborough, Mass., firm, formed in March of this year by the merger of Lane15 and InfiniSwitch, changed its name to Fabric Networks in June. It was trying to sell InfiniBand switches for high-speed server-to-server interconnection (see InfiniSwitch Now Fabric Networks and InfiniSwitch Merges Lanes).
Unfortunately, the name change didn't do the company any good.
Nessler says that most of the company's 30 remaining employees have been laid off, with a small team staying on to explore the sale of its assets. "The market is still a tough, tough market," she says. "It was really about timing of the revenue opportunity and the return on investment our investors were looking for."
The two companies that merged to form Fabric Networks had raised a total of $52 million in funding. Lane 15 had secured $22 million from investors including Index Ventures, Quanta Computer Inc., Convergent Investors, AV Labs, Austin Ventures, Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq: DELL), Intel Capital, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. [Disclosure: Lightspeed is an investor in Light Reading Inc., publisher of Byte and Switch.]
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