Headquartered in Frankfurt, Fraport AG is one of the world’s leading airport operators. It manages Frankfurt Airport, Germany’s busiest, along with 28 others across the globe. More than 174 million passengers overall used airports actively managed by Fraport in 2024.
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.
Fraport, the operator of Frankfurt Airport and several other airports worldwide, faces various challenges post-pandemic:
These challenges necessitate strategic planning and flexible adjustments to ensure long-term success.
With innovation at the heart of Fraport's strategic vision, the company is focused on achieving seamless, frictionless processes to increase operational efficiency and customer satisfaction by 2030. As such, evolving their technology stack and advancing digital transformation are essential to achieving this goal.
Within the Venture Clienting Unit at Fraport, Marina and her colleagues manage approximately 18 digitalization projects every year. With responsibility for the entire process from project idea to overseeing implementation and scaling, the team was operating at full capacity, relying heavily on exceptional scouting results to identify market solutions that address pain points. An efficient scouting process is important for achieving our overall goals.
“Our goal as a Venture Client Unit is to find solutions that are a bit 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 digitalisation needs, the Venture Clienting team sought a market intelligence platform that could provide a clear and comprehensive overview of the market, eliminating the need for time-consuming and often inconclusive manual research alongside existing approaches.
The team at Fraport is part of the Plug and Play network and uses FounderNest as an additional source for scouting. Marina shared how valuable the platform has been: “As a tool, FounderNest is extremely efficient for us. It meets all our core needs 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.
