Headquartered in Frankfurt, Fraport AG is one of the world’s leading airport operators. It manages Frankfurt Airport, Germany’s busiest, along with 30 others across the globe. With major hubs in North America, Greece, and Brazil, more than 174 million passengers passed through airports managed by Fraport in 2024 alone.
Founded in 1924, Fraport has since grown into a global operator with expertise in everything from airport construction and terminal management to cargo and retail. The company’s corporate slogan, “Connecting the world with tomorrow,” reflects its aim to always deliver unforgettable experiences to its customers, ensure operational excellence across its global network of airports, and keep its business at the forefront of innovation.
In an industry that was heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Fraport has been facing a number of challenges from several directions. The labor shortage is creating difficulty in roles that still rely heavily on people power such as security, baggage, and other ground operations. What’s more, while passenger numbers have bounced back in most international locations, Frankfurt has struggled to reach the same levels of footfall that were being seen before the pandemic.
On an operational level, legacy technology and slow digital transformation at Fraport has been a sticking point. Marina Lutzenberger is a Senior Project Manager in Corporate Strategy & Digitalization for Fraport, and explains more: “Technology and digitalization is an area where we are running behind other industries. Usually, the IT systems we have in place are legacy systems, especially many of our core processes and operations. From a technical point of view, this can make it tricky for us to work with updated technologies and digital tools.
“But from a cultural point of view, 30% of our employees will retire in the next 10 years. The average age is quite high which is a good thing when it comes to experience but can make it difficult when it comes to adapting to new ways of working and new technologies.”
With innovation at the heart of Fraport's strategic vision, the company is focused on achieving seamless, frictionless processes to enhance operational efficiency by 2030. As such, evolving their technology stack and advancing digital transformation are essential to achieving this goal.
Part of the Venture Clienting Unit at Fraport, Marina and her colleagues manage approximately 50 digitalization projects every year. With responsibility for the entire digitalization process from project idea to overseeing implementation and scaling, the team was operating at full capacity and a heavy reliance on manual search methods like Google and networking was becoming increasingly time-consuming and inefficient.
“Our goal as a Venture Client Unit is to find solutions that are off the beaten path. We typically look for start-ups with a proven product already on the market, but we’re also open to alternative approaches outside the typical vendors that offer solutions in a given field.”
Faced with the challenge of meeting Fraport’s digitalization needs, the Venture Clienting team sought a market intelligence platform which could deliver a clear, comprehensive view of the market without the time-consuming and often inconclusive burden of manual research.
“We wanted to ensure we had a complete overview of what was available on the market that aligned with the needs we identified in our digitalization projects. We’re not tied to a specific technology to solve a problem, so we take a fairly open approach in our search for vendors that fit our needs.
“If we’re just Googling, we’re not able to broaden our horizons and find these kinds of solutions. And, when we’re looking at a project duration of only three months, the faster we can identify core solutions, the better.”
The team at Fraport uses Plug and Play in conjunction with FounderNest, and despite joining Fraport when FounderNest was already in place, Marina shared how valuable the platform has been: “FounderNest as a tool is far more efficient for us. It covers the core of what we need in terms of scouting and identifying potential vendors."
“Usually, we would have two or three companies in mind that might solve our challenge. But the Similar Companies search is the most important feature for us because it expands our view of the market.”
For Fraport’s Venture Clienting team, FounderNest offers a way for them to automate repetitive tasks and focus on higher-value work, such as identifying relevant trends or specific providers on the market that can support their digitalization journey.
Since adopting FounderNest, the team at Fraport has seen a tangible shift not just in how innovation projects are run but in what becomes possible with the same level of resources. One of the most immediate benefits has been the time saved during the scouting phase: “We can save at least a week in the project schedule for scouting,” Marina explains.
What’s more, FounderNest has provided a powerful way for the team at Fraport to surface relevant solutions and identify key market trends ahead of their competition. As a result, the team has been able to broaden its role beyond project delivery to proactive scouting.
Marina shares more: “Our role is not only to run projects but also to identify trends or specific providers on the market that could be interesting for our business units, not only in Frankfurt but worldwide. We have a concept in place called Open Pitch Day, where startups can apply twice a year, independent of any current use case. If their solution looks promising, we can connect them directly with our business units. We can use FounderNest not just to review incoming applications, but also to proactively identify and contact startups ourselves.”
In the early phases of each project, FounderNest has significantly reduced the time required for scouting suitable vendors and solutions. “We’ve been able to reduce the amount of time that is needed for scouting by 30%,” Marina shares. “That gives us the opportunity to either run or test the solution a bit longer or reduce the total duration of the project - which means we can add more slots in the pipeline and take on more projects.”
This additional capacity is already translating into measurable outcomes. In the past year, six of Fraport’s projects selected a vendor that was identified exclusively through FounderNest - solutions the team likely wouldn’t have found through their usual channels.
“That’s the most important KPI for us,” Marina adds. “If we end up selecting a supplier that we could have also found through Google, it’s still useful to have them. But where FounderNest really adds value is in helping us find providers we wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. Our goal last year was to have at least two of those ‘unique hits’ from FounderNest for our projects - we actually had six.”
Looking ahead, the team at Fraport is focused on further embedding FounderNest into their daily operations. While it has already helped to streamline scouting and market research, the next step is to integrate it into a more comprehensive workflow management tool that can connect the entire digitalization process from idea to implementation and scaling.
Fraport’s Venture Clienting team currently manages its growing portfolio of projects using a mix of standard office tools: Microsoft Teams for day-to-day communication, while shared Word documents and Excel sheets help them to keep track of project details and timelines.
As the number of projects and internal collaborators has grown, the limitations of this approach have become clearer, so Marina and the team have embarked on a project to transform their workflow - using FounderNest to research and source potential solution partners.
“At the moment, we are purely Office 365-based. We collaborate on Teams and documents, but we’ve actually started a project now to identify solutions on the market to make this better, especially for the Venture Clienting unit,” she shares. “We want to take our whole workflow - from having a pipeline of project ideas to running a project - and have a kind of CRM in place to stay in contact, especially with other business units.”
“Where FounderNest really adds value is in helping us find providers we wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. Our goal last year was to have at least two of those ‘unique hits’ for our projects - we actually had six. We’ve been able to reduce the amount of time that is needed for scouting by 30%. That gives us the opportunity to either run or test the solution a bit longer or reduce the total duration of the project - which means we can add more slots in the pipeline and do more projects.”
Marina Lutzenberger, Senior Project Manager Corporate Strategy & Digitalization
The team uses Office 365 and Microsoft Team for internal collaboration and document sharing. Plug and Play is another key resource, offering access to a wider network of startups and innovation partners.
