Creating the Fabric of the Personalized Internet
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February 2025
Introducing Fabric
At Fabric, we are building the personalization layer of the Internet.
Until now, all apps and websites have operated with silo'ed user data, created and used within their own systems.
We are creating a more holistic way of understanding users by allowing users to bring their cross-platform preferences to different apps and services on the internet.
Our team comes from fintech, commerce, and crypto backgrounds. We are strong proponents of the Open Banking model of data, popularised by fintech intermediaries like Plaid. We saw the consumer and competition benefits of this model firsthand in our previous roles.
When we came together at Entrepreneur First, it was to build a personal data intermediary that would create new industries and supercharge existing ones by unleashing the value of consumer's search and social context.
Imagine every B2C company building products from the same level of individual user understanding that Google, TikTok, and Meta have! Imagine the consumer surplus that will be generated by allowing consumers to port their universal context and scope access to it based on the value that they receive.
We are starting with shopping because:
- People love shopping but are constantly overwhelmed by the wide selection of products that are pushed at them. I receive hundreds of weekly emails from brands that I love shopping at but most of them don't capture my attention. Shopping feeds never quite manage to capture my taste as well as Pinterest or Meta.
- Brands care about providing curated customer experiences to build a strong community of fans. This way, brands can own their customer relationships instead of relying on black box advertising algorithms to drive traffic and revenue.
- Shopping is being disrupted by AI agents and we expect delightful new shopping experiences that make spending time on discovery more fun and exciting than it has ever been. Generative UI, generative recommendations, context rich conversations to name a few.
Taste driven shopping will become more like spending time with a personal shopper who really gets you (rather than a concierge that shops for you)!
By creating Fabric, we are unlocking this future!
Why Now?
We are not the first company to attempt building portable user context for personalization. From the early days of Microsoft Passport to Facebook's early ambitions of being a platform for personalized apps, there have been many attempts made to collect and democratize user preferences (particularly post GDPR).
Instead of outlining why they failed, I find it more productive to highlight what has changed recently that makes this problem more solvable than it has been in the past.
Data Portability
Regulations like GDPR (in EU and UK) set out core concepts such as the subject access requests that users can make to get a copy of their personal data.
But it wasn't until 2024, that the Digital Markets Act ("DMA") set out a framework for big tech platforms to provide for real-time, programmatic access to user data, with the user's consent. This is as game changing as Payment Services Directive 2 ("PSD2") was in kicking off Open Banking driven API access to financial data.
The concepts behind PSD2 and DMA are exactly the same. The user is an equal party in creating data and should be able to use this data to their advantage. It should be not be silo'ed within the platform it was created.
Data portability is already becoming a global concept. In November 2024, the US CFPB finalised Rule 1033 on personal financial data rights making user data financial data available through APIs (similar to PSD2).
Under the DMA, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Booking.com have all made programmatic access to EU user's data available. It is incredible that this data has been unleashed and that getting user consent takes just a few clicks (from user studies conducted by Fabric).
Consumer Behaviour
Consumers are now more comfortable with sharing personal context due to financial data sharing unlocking huge amounts of consumer value.
According to studies conducted by Bain, only 30% of consumers are unwilling to share their browsing data in exchange for help with the discovery and decision-making phases of their purchasing journey.
We are finding this to be particularly true when the request for sharing data is coming from brands that users feel deeply loyal towards. Users want to help brands that they love by showing them who they are.
AI Agents
AI agents operate best with rich, user context and are coming of age at the same time that users are becoming comfortable with sharing data and the concept of data portability is catching on.
This opens up many new consumer focused use cases in shopping, dating, gaming, personal assistants, to name a few.
We are experimenting with cutting edge startups to support their use cases with our API product.
What are we building?
With Fabric, D2C companies can understand and activate their customers using cross-platform data.
We provide you with:
Fabric Link: a custom consent flow that can be sent as a URL via email/text or embedded into apps and websites with one line of code. We can get you up and running in under 10 minutes.
Tapestry API: our API for developers to access cross-platform customer data with their consent. We support Google, LinkedIn, and Pinterest with support upcoming for Meta, TikTok, Amazon, and Booking. For the Open Banking aficionados, this is the search and social equivalent of Plaid's Transactions API.
E-commerce integrations: our custom integrations to inject cross-platform customer insights directly into our brand's e-commerce platforms (e.g. Shopify).
Reach out to us!
We are creating the personalization layer of the Internet, working directly with the most forward thinking brands in shaping the future of customer understanding and engagement.
Reach out to us if you are interested in our mission and want to understand how Fabric can supercharge your customer understanding.