Silicon Alley blues: Fab may be latest high-profile NYC startup to sink

It appears Fab.com is about to be a member of a club no one wants to join.

The e-commerce company is on the verge of being sold for as little as $15 million to custom manufacturer PCH International, according to a report from TechCrunch. The news comes less than a year after it raised $150 million at $1 billion valuation.

The news isn’t surprising. Back in August, Fab cofounder Jason Goldberg confirmed the company was in talks to sell and that it was spinning off some parts of the company into a new brand, called Hem. Still, at that point, the reported selling price was between $100 million and $150 million.

Just a couple of years ago, Fab.com was on a shortlist of New York City’s hottest startups.

At the top of the list would have been Tumblr, the social blogging site that sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion in 2013. A decent enough exit. But it also appeared to be an urgent one.

Tumblr was reportedly running out of cash at the time as it struggled with how to become a business. Since then, Yahoo appears to have turned things around, and Tumblr is now on the road toward generating $100 million in revenue in 2015. But it still dashed hopes that NYC would have its own independent web giant.

Next on the list: Foursquare. The location-based service has raised more than $160 million in venture capital in five years. But this past year, it cleaved itself in two, spinning off its check-in feature into a new app called Swarm. The company is still trying to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. But its prospects for maturing into a sustainable business seem poor.

Finally, there is Gilt Groupe. Gilt’s future remains intriguing, and uncertain. Earlier this year, reports swirled that the e-commerce company was picking its bankers and planning for an IPO in the third quarter. But, once again, the rumors about a planned Gilt IPO were wrong.

Still, hope remains. Will Gilt still pull off the IPO that gives NYC its big Internet win?