Found Fair Ventures

Found Fair Ventures

Bonello and partner Philip Conrath founded Found Fair Ventures in 2010 as an operational venture builder, not a fund. The firm assembles engineers and entrepreneurs in-house, then deploys them against digitization bottlenecks in the construction industry — an approach that turns company creation into a repeatable process rather than a series of one-off bets. Its portfolio originates entirely from internal idea generation, with resources concentrated on PropTech and construction-tech plays such as a jobsite documentation platform and an embeddable trade-calculator engine for automated quoting. The firm’s capital deployment follows the venture-builder model: it seeds internal startups with shared engineering, design, and go-to-market resources, then governs them as majority-held operating subsidiaries. Two known active startups target distinct pain points in German construction — a market still dominated by paper workflows and fragmented contractor coordination. The first product anchors itself as a collaborative planning tool for homeowners and tradespeople, while the second digitizes quote generation across multiple building trades through white-label calculators that integrate into third-party platforms. Found Fair operates from a single office in Berlin-Mitte and claims a professional headcount of 150 across more than ten nationalities, making it one of the larger venture-builders in Europe’s PropTech corridor. The firm does not disclose assets under management and lists no known adjacent philanthropic vehicles, external LP base, or peer-network affiliations on its public materials. Its website states eight active startups in the current portfolio, all built from scratch within the Found Fair operating structure. What distinguishes the firm from a standard early-stage VC is its absent external capital cycle. Found Fair does not raise episodic funds and does not market itself to institutional allocators; instead it behaves as a permanently capitalized holding company that originates and operates ventures. This architecture sidesteps the pressure to exit on a fund clock, but it also obscures financial performance and governance rights — no public record documents how operating companies are capitalized, how returns accrue back to principals, or whether external co-investors participate in single-asset vehicles.