Where the equity came from.

Kolonos B.V. started in 1997 and established a daughter company, Collis Holding B.V. Collis worked on card payment security: chip on card, contactless payments, later mobile payments. It did so at the point where that industry was being built rather than maintained, and it grew into a successful company operating worldwide.

In 2012 Collis Holding B.V. was sold to UL. That business is now part of FIME. Five years later Kolonos invested in Secura B.V., a specialist cybersecurity advisory firm working mainly in the Benelux, and in 2021 Secura was sold to Bureau Veritas and merged into a global cybersecurity division.

One company built, one backed, both sold. Since then Kolonos has been an investment and holding company, and the question has been what to do with the proceeds rather than what to build next.

Very lean. The company has only a few part-time employees and a postal address, and it deliberately has not acquired the apparatus that usually comes with money.

Kolonos is a commercial business. It invests for profit, it expects a return, and it says so plainly. The alternative, a family office presenting itself as a charity with a portfolio, is not true and would not survive a first conversation.

Alongside that, Kolonos aims to do business in a socially responsible way, and some investments are therefore only semi-commercial. Of the four buildings it owns, two are monuments still in use for what they were built for: the church building on Peperstraat in Gouda, held together with SamenInvesteren B.V., in religious and office use, and the Zuiderkerk in Assen, in religious and social use. That continuing use is what makes them semi-commercial rather than commercial.

A substantial part of the profit is donated to charity. We do not publish the amounts or the recipients, because naming them would turn the giving into marketing.

The requirements are the same whether the subject is a building, a company or a fund, and they are short enough to hold in your head.