Fabrana.ai Launches AI Sparks in Santa Cruz

Jul 15

Rocket Fuel for Teams, Backed by the City’s $5K Innovation Grant

Fabrana.ai, a nonprofit creative AI studio, has officially launched in Santa Cruz, and it’s here to unlock a whole new kind of workplace magic.

Thanks to a $5,000 innovation grant from the City of Santa Cruz Economic Development Team, and in partnership with UCSC’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development (CIED) and Santa Cruz Works, Fabrana is rolling out its first community pilot: a bold new program delivering custom-built AI Sparks to local businesses, for free.

“The future of work isn’t about replacing people — it’s about turbocharging them,” says Fabrana founder Toby Corey (Fabrana.ai founder). “We build Sparks that dissolve friction, restore time, and amplify human creativity.”

What is a Fabrana.ai Spark?

A Spark is a lightweight, intelligent micro-agent built to handle one specific workflow problem — like an AI teammate that shows up, gets the job done, and frees your team to focus on what matters.

We’re not talking about chatbots or dashboards. We’re talking about handcrafted, high-ROI agents that:

Write and personalize LinkedIn outreach
Turn long videos into short social-ready clips
Auto-sync tasks between tools like Slack, Airtable, and Google
Summarize meeting notes into polished briefs
Handle onboarding flows for new hires or customers
Analyze feedback or reviews and surface insights in minutes

Most Sparks are built in 1–2 days, often for under $1,000, and deliver immediate impact. They don’t replace people. They restore flow.

What Problem Are We Solving?

AI is booming — but most teams are stuck.

Small businesses and everyday workgroups want to automate, but:

They don’t know where to start
They don’t have technical teams
They’re buried under IT backlogs and vendor noise

Fabrana flips that script.

We’re a two-sided AI studio:

On one side: Teams submit their workflow pain
On the other: Agent Builders — UCSC students, creators, and self-taught developers — build Sparks using low/no-code tools like Bardeen, CrewAI, LangChain, and Relevance

It’s not outsourcing. It’s ignition.

Santa Cruz Spark Pilot: Get a Free Spark Built for Your Team

With support from the City and UCSC, Fabrana is offering a free AI pilot to help local businesses and workgroups automate what slows them down — quickly, creatively, and with no cost or commitment.

Here’s how it works:

Fill out a quick form describing your workflow challenge
Fabrana will review submissions and schedule discovery calls with ~10 teams
From there, 3–4 teams will be selected for a free custom Spark build + test

No IT required
No long timelines
Just clarity, flow, and lift

👉 Apply here → https://bit.ly/4lt2apt

Who Should Apply?

We want to hear from:

Business leaders, execs, and operators
Managers and team leads who see daily workflow pain
Creative employees with a spark of an idea for how AI could help

If you’ve ever thought:

“Why are we still doing this manually?”
“Why can’t this just happen automatically?”
“If only we had something that connected these tools…”

…then you’re exactly who we built this for.

What Sparks Can Do

Some real examples of Sparks already in the wild:

HR Flow Spark: Sends onboarding checklists, books intro calls, shares key docs
Content Remix Spark: Breaks webinars into social clips with branded CTAs
Sales Follow-Up Spark: Tracks engagement and sends next-step nudges
Ops Report Spark: Pulls KPIs, formats slides, and emails your weekly update
Support Synth Spark: Summarizes ticket volume, top issues, and churn risks

One Spark won’t change your entire business — but it might change your week.

The Fabrana Model: Built for Flow

Fabrana isn’t a platform. It’s a creative studio for intelligent agents — and a community where students, builders, and businesses grow together.

Every Spark feeds into a living Agent Library, available for remixing, co-ownership, and collective intelligence. This is reuse economics. No lock-in. No gatekeeping. And it’s all part of Fabrana’s mission as a 501(c)(3): to return time, energy, and joy to the people doing the work.

Why Santa Cruz?

Because we don’t need to wait for Silicon Valley to tell us how AI works.

Santa Cruz is creative, scrappy, and soul-aligned — the perfect place to show what happens when students, teams, and public leaders come together to shape something real.

We’re not pitching vapor.
We’re building Sparks.
And we’re launching them right here, right now.

A Big Shout to Our Santa Cruz Partners

This launch wouldn’t be possible without a visionary local crew:

Nada Miljkovic, Project Manager for UCSC’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development
Doug Erickson, Executive Director of Santa Cruz Works
Bonnie Lipscomb, Santa Cruz Deputy City Manager

These are the kinds of people who don’t just talk innovation — they move it. We’re beyond grateful.