Fab Fund

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Description

Massimo Menichinelli:

"Since Fab Labs have so far been dependent on fundings and have been rarely self-sufficient, Gershenfeld’s brother Alan and fellow venture capitalist Michael Angst founded a for-profit project called Fab Fund in 2007. The wiki at Fab Lab Iceland describes Fab Fund as:

- a double-bottom line investment fund that seeks market financial returns through investments that empower individuals to create small enterprises and sustainable-livelihood businesses. The Fab Fund focuses exclusively on products and services that enable or are enabled by the democratizing effect of personal fabrication.

Fab Fund is a sort of “micro-venture capitalism“: its $200,000 capital has been invested in for-profit businesses that prototype or manufacture their products in Fab Labs around the world, in order to make distributed manufacturing a viable business model. The fabcompany.com website is currently down and the status of this project is unknown; anyway it seems that the Fab Academy program is currently collaborating with Fab Fund “to help global capital find local inventors and local inventions find global markets”. (http://www.openp2pdesign.org/2011/fabbing/business-models-for-fab-labs/)