FabianGruner

Partner

Growth | Berlin

Fabian Gruner grew up with a mother who was a computer scientist and a father who was an engineer. This left him with a curiosity not just about what technology is, but about what it can do when pushed to its limits. He studied Business Administration and Computer Science at WHU and TU Munich, graduated top of his class, added a degree in Technology Management from CDTM and Columbia Business School, and started his career at BCG and J.P. Morgan. A chapter at Munich-based growth fund Acton Capital followed, before Fabian made a sharp detour into the operational world.

As employee number one at Foodora, he helped scale the company from a single person to 800 across 13 cities in a matter of months, building the global sales and marketing teams entirely from scratch.

When he joined HV in 2018, he brought two things with him: the analytical rigour of someone trained across the best institutions in the world, and the instinct of someone who has had to make things work under real pressure.

German robotics company raises record sum

The robotics company from Metzingen will receive up to $1.4 billion in funding. The financing round primarily involved US corporations such as Tether, Amazon, Nvidia, and Qualcomm.

UnternehmerTUM tops ranking of Europe’s leading startup hubs

15/03/2024Read More

Laser drill from Munich start-up aims to reduce mining costs

Nov 2, 2026Read More

I'm excited by DeepTech

I grew up around engineers and scientists. That shaped how I see technology: not as a product category, but as a set of problems waiting to be solved at scale. The founders I back aren't building better versions of what exists. They're converting decades of scientific progress into real technology with global relevance. Rockets, humanoid robots, autonomous drones, nuclear fusion, next-generation memory chips. These aren't science projects. They're the infrastructure of the next century. And defensibility in deep tech isn't just about the technology. It's about the courage to attempt what most people don't believe is possible yet, and the discipline to execute it. Those two things together are rare. But combined, the opportunity is enormous.

I'm on the lookout for:

Founders who know why they're the ones to solve it. II've been building conviction in hardware and frontier science since before it became a category for most funds. I understand the timelines, the technical risks, and the dynamics that come with building something genuinely new. I don't need founders to explain why the problem is hard. I need to understand why they're the ones to solve it.

Hard technology with real market ambition

The companies that excite me most sit at the intersection of genuine scientific breakthrough and commercial conviction. Not technology for its own sake, but technology that reshapes an industry, a supply chain, a defence capability, an energy system. The science has to be real. So does the market.

Vision big enough to need an ecosystem.

The companies I back, from Isar Aerospace to NEURA Robotics or Quantum Systems, are building things that reshape entire industries. I'm drawn to founders with that kind of ambition, and I've spent years building the relationships across research institutions, corporates, and government that help those companies grow beyond the product itself.