The former chief financial officer of onetime Seattle e-commerce startup Fabric has been convicted of four counts of wire fraud for taking and misusing around $35 million from his former employer.

Nevin Shetty, 41, of Mercer Island, Wash., was found guilty on Nov. 7, after a nine-day jury trial, according to a news release from the United States Attorney’s office for the Western District of Washington.

“This defendant exploited his position of power and trust in an attempt to profit from his crime and then lied to cover it up,” U.S. Attorney Neil Floyd said in a statement.

Shetty joined Fabric as CFO in March 2021. The company, which moved its headquarters out of Seattle to San Francisco last year, was raising capital at the time and Shetty helped draft a policy governing how the money raised should be invested conservatively while the company worked to grow its business.

Prosecutors said Shetty diverted funds in early 2022 to his own cryptocurrency business, HighTower Treasury, without authorization. Although he helped create the company’s policy limiting investments to low-risk accounts, he secretly moved the money into high-yield decentralized finance platforms that promised 20% returns.

According to records, Shetty’s plan was to pay his employer 6% interest and keep the rest of the profits through HighTower. In the first month, he and a partner made about $133,000, but by May 2022, the crypto investments had collapsed, wiping out nearly all $35 million.

After confessing to colleagues, Shetty was fired and the company reported the theft to the FBI.

Shetty was indicted in May 2023.

Jurors deliberated about 10 hours before reaching the guilty verdict last week. Judge Tana Lin scheduled sentencing for Feb. 11, 2026. Wire fraud is punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Cisco plans to acquire NeuralFabric, a Seattle-area startup founded by a group of Microsoft veterans that makes back-end software for companies to build and run their own generative AI models. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The Silicon Valley enterprise tech mainstay said the deal will bolster its AI Canvas initiative, a generative UI and collaboration environment announced earlier this year.

In its announcement Thursday morning, Cisco highlighted NeuralFabric’s expertise in distributed systems, model training, and flexible deployment as a complement to its existing AI assistant, cybersecurity models, and data fabric strategy.

DJ Sampath, senior vice president for AI software and platforms, said in the announcement that the startup has “cracked a crucial part of this puzzle” by building technology that lets companies develop their own domain-specific small language models using proprietary data across cloud or on-premises environments.

NeuralFabric, based in Redmond, was founded in 2023 by former Microsoft Azure engineering veteran Weijie Lin (CEO), longtime Microsoft executive John deVadoss, AI entrepreneur Jesus Rodriguez (president), and cloud and security veteran Mark Baciak (CTO), with former Microsoft director Drew Gude (chief revenue officer) also listed as an early exec.

The startup employs about nine people, according to LinkedIn. Cisco said the acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of its 2026 fiscal year (by the end of January), after which NeuralFabric’s team will join the company’s AI Software and Platform organization.

NeuralFabric had raised at least $5 million in funding as of February 2024 announcement. PitchBook lists investors including Collab+Currency, CMT Digital, and New Form Capital.