The venture fund
The Fair By Design Fund supports technology businesses that are tackling the poverty premium by reducing living costs and enhancing accessibility. This initiative focuses on correcting market inefficiencies in several key sectors, including financial services, credit accessibility, insurance, food and household goods, energy, and transport. These efforts are aimed at catalyzing significant systemic change, striving to create a fairer and more affordable existence for low-income households throughout the UK.
The Fund operates separately from the advocacy programme and is managed by Ascension Ventures. It is no longer investing in new companies.
venture fund investments
The Fair By Design Fund invested in 25 companies at pre-seed and seed stages and had two exits (Credit Kudos to Apple and Guardian Angel to Octopus).
Fair By Design Fund
Jean De Fougerolles
Jean De Fougerolles
As CEO of Ascension Ventures, Jean has lead the investment of over 85 early stage technology businesses, a number of them with a social impact focus. Jean has over 20 years experience working in media and digital businesses. After obtaining his MBA from INSEAD in 1996, he became Head of Distribution for MTV Europe out of the London office.
Iulia Tudor
Iulia Tudor
Iulia manages the Fair By Design portfolio, where she leads the work streams related to maximising the value-add to the portfolio and other stakeholders. She supports the portfolio companies build their fundraising strategies, connects them with potential customers and other partners within the network.
Freya Wordsworth
Freya Wordsworth
Freya is an Associate at Ascension. She is responsible for due diligence, deal analysis, portfolio support for Ascension’s Institutional Funds. She pursued her passion for the start up world, initially joining the founding team of Regionally, an investment start up supporting the UK levelling up agenda. After almost three years, eventually acting as Head of Investment and Marketing, Freya moved into partnerships, working with start up founder community, The Founding Network and development partner Deazy, before joining the Ascension team.
Emma Steele
Emma Steele
Emma is FBD’s dedicated Investment Director. Emma joined from Eastside Primetimers, where she advised charities and social enterprises of various sizes and sectors on investment readiness and capacity building projects. Prior to that, Emma spent 5 years in Corporate Banking at Santander Bank. Emma has a Master’s Degree in Development Economics from the University of Sussex.
Alex Heerema
Alex Heerema
Alex is Syndicate Manager at the Ascension Syndicate where he identifies hand-picked, high potential businesses for investors to co-invest with Ascension into. He was previously an Investment Associate at Ascension’s Institutional funds where he sourced, screened and performed due diligence on investment opportunities. Prior to joining Ascension, Alex was an early employee in two B2B software startups, where he focussed on launching and optimising go-to-market strategies to deliver scalable growth. He also has investment experience at Prime Ventures in Amsterdam and Techstars, London.