Why Playfair Capital invested in NetFabric.ai
Recently, NetFabric closed a $2.2 million pre-seed funding round, led by Founderful and Playfair Capital.
NetFabric is a tool that answers any question about your network: it integrates all network data sources to deliver real-time answers to every network question. Playfair Capital recently shared an article on why they invested in the company. With their permission, we are publishing a case study with key lessons for early-stage founders.
The lessons are as simple as that:
1. “A significant and costly problem, unaddressed by current solutions”
The problem is outages. For instance, a one-hour outage at Amazon in 2021 led to $34 million in lost sales. And it’s not just that; imagine how many outages there are in the world that are not reported publicly, leading to direct and indirect losses.
Here are a few examples NetFabric showed in their pitch deck:
Beyond the immediate financial hit, downtimes also lead to second-order problems, such as switching the focus of the engineering team to fixing network issues instead of developing the product further, or to reputation risks and user churn.
The previous widely adopted solution was monitoring. However, as noted in Playfair’s article, monitoring simply provides alerts that may be based on incomplete information, and still have to be interpreted to find a root cause, and often send engineering teams in the wrong direction, which may lead to losing time. This is a very expensive time, as stated previously.
Traditional monitoring tools struggle with this challenge of reasoning across different data sources. Unlike them, NetFabric collects and connects all data sources and observations. This is important because the hardest task when analyzing network issues is figuring out how different aspects of the network interact. NetFabric achieves this by combining the precision of complex mathematical models with the flexibility of large language models to navigate the flood of incoming observations in a comprehensive way.
This is a perfect example of leveraging AI to address a significant industry problem.
2. ”A large market with deep pockets”
The AIOps market is projected to grow to USD 79.91 billion by 2029, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.01%. Valued at USD 3.34 billion in 2023, the global network monitoring market is expected to reach USD 8.30 billion by 2032.
3. “The right founders to solve this problem”
The team behind the product — Beni Bichsel, Tobias Bühler, and Marlene Brakhane — brings extensive expertise from both academic and commercial perspectives. Their product is based on years of research at ETH and is supported by a stellar advisory team, including two professors from ETH and a commercial advisor who is a serial entrepreneur and successful founder.
Beni Bichsel (CEO) holds a PhD in Computer Science from ETH Zurich, specializing in reducing programming complexity. Recognized for his outstanding dissertation in Programming Languages, Beni's technical expertise and leadership drive NetFabric’s mission to revolutionize network monitoring.
Tobias Bühler (CTO) completed his PhD at ETH Zurich, focusing on advanced network monitoring tools. Collaborating with industry leaders like Swisscom, Benocs, and Google, Tobias bridges complex technical concepts with practical applications, keeping NetFabric at the forefront of network monitoring innovation.
Marlene Brakhane (COO) brings over 8 years of experience leading operations and strategic initiatives in both startups and multinational corporations. She has successfully scaled and exited startups from Seed to Series F, complementing the team's academic expertise with her commercial acumen.