Inside the $25 Trillion Future of the Built Environment: A Conversation with Zacua Ventures
Across global industries, few sectors are as large, or as slow to change, as construction, real estate, and the broader built environment. Worth more than $25 trillion globally, the industry touches everything from infrastructure to data centers to housing and urban development. Yet despite its scale, it has historically adopted new technologies far more slowly than other sectors.
To explore why that is, and where the biggest opportunities for innovation lie, we spoke with Juan Nieto, General Partner at Zacua Ventures, a venture fund focused on the built environment. The firm invests in technologies shaping how we build, operate, and manage physical assets, connecting startups with large industry players across the construction and real estate value chain.
From Construction Sites to Venture Capital: Juan Nieto’s Journey
My father is an entrepreneur, so I was always quite close to business and technology growing up. Over time, I felt increasingly drawn toward the intersection of those two worlds.
After spending a few years investing in private markets, I realized I wanted to combine my civil engineering background with technology and innovation.
Originally trained as a civil engineer, he began his career working directly on construction sites before moving into management consulting in the United States. He later returned to Europe to join the investment team at Altamar CAM Partners in Madrid, where he spent several years working in private markets.
But his interest increasingly shifted toward the intersection of construction and technology. That led him to join CEMEX, one of the world’s largest cement companies, where he helped build and run CEMEX Ventures, the company’s corporate venture arm.
During his time there, the team invested in more than 20 startups globally while also developing programs around venture clienting, acceleration, and internal innovation.
Through that experience, we realized a few things. First, if you look at construction and the broader built environment, it’s actually the largest industry in the world.
It’s an enormous market with huge potential for disruption, but it’s also an industry where risk is constantly pushed down the value chain. Because of that, adopting new technologies often runs counter to the industry’s natural incentives.
In many ways, the biggest challenge in this sector is simply technology adoption, largely because the incentives are not always aligned.
Through that work, they realized construction may be the largest industry in the world, but it has seen relatively little transformation over the past century.
The second realization was that innovation can come from anywhere. It might come from India, Singapore, London, or San Francisco. For investors, it’s extremely difficult to track everything that’s happening globally.
That realization ultimately led to the creation of Zacua Ventures.
The firm was launched to bring together global corporate partners and emerging startups, helping both sides move faster: investors can make better-informed decisions, while startups gain direct access to large industry players that can accelerate their growth.
The idea behind the fund is closely tied to my own career. I’m a civil engineer by training, and I actually started my career working on construction sites.
By connecting these two sides, we believe we can not only make better investment decisions but also help startups scale faster by giving them access to real industry partners.
Since launching in 2022, Zacua Ventures has quickly become one of the most active investors in the built environment sector, deploying more than 40 investments across 27 companies worldwide. The firm is now deploying its second fund, continuing its mission to back technologies reshaping the world’s largest and most complex industry.
Fund Two and a Bigger Vision for the Built Environment
Since launching its first fund, Zacua Ventures has continued expanding its investment strategy. While the core focus remains the same, the second fund reflects a natural evolution of the firm’s approach.
Nothing really changed. Fund two is definitely larger than fund one, and we are deploying larger checks. So we are going after slightly larger opportunities than before.
The firm continues to invest under the same three thematic pillars that guide its strategy across the built environment: productivity, sustainability, and industrial resiliency. These themes shape how the team evaluates startups and technologies that could transform how the world builds and operates physical infrastructure.
But to understand Zacua Ventures’ thesis, Juan says it is important first to clarify what the built environment actually means, a term that goes far beyond construction technology alone.
People often think about construction technology as software for builders or contractors. But the built environment is much broader than that.
The built environment is not just construction technology. It’s the full system that shapes how the world is financed, designed, physically built, and ultimately operated.
In practice, this includes everything from construction, real estate, infrastructure, and energy systems to the supply chains, labor systems, and industrial equipment that support them.
Seen through this lens, the built environment becomes far more than a single industry.
If you think about everything happening around us, climate change, infrastructure resilience, defense spending, AI adoption, and population moving into cities, what unlocks all those opportunities is the built environment. It sits at the center of all those forces.
It’s essentially the physical operating system of our society.
And that system is facing massive challenges. Labor shortages remain one of the most urgent problems globally, limiting the ability to build housing and infrastructure at the scale needed.
Labor shortages keep coming up as the single biggest issue everywhere. We simply don’t have enough workers to build the housing and infrastructure the world needs.
At the same time, the industry accounts for a significant share of global emissions, and its environmental impact is another major pressure point.
The built environment is responsible for close to 40% of global carbon emissions, from materials like steel and cement to the operation of massive buildings and data centers.
For Juan, these challenges are exactly what make the opportunity so large. Construction technology is often understood as software for builders. But the real scale of this opportunity is much bigger.
Ultimately, the firm’s ambition is to support technologies that help the industry adapt to a rapidly changing world.
“What we’re really doing is enabling the world to become future-ready.”
How Global Trends Are Accelerating Demand
Many of the global trends shaping the economy today are actually intensifying the need to invest in the built environment. From artificial intelligence to infrastructure spending and housing shortages, Juan believes these forces are creating powerful tailwinds for the sector.
One of the best examples is the growth in demand for AI and computing, which is putting enormous pressure on data center development.
The growth of AI adoption has really put a spotlight on data centers. In the US today, data centers are already the second largest building segment after residential. They’ve even surpassed commercial buildings.
But the speed at which new data centers need to be built is not yet matching the demand for computing capacity.
The pace at which we need to build and bring data centers to market simply doesn’t keep pace with the demand for computing power.
Beyond AI, massive government spending on infrastructure and defense is also fueling demand for construction and industrial capabilities. A large share of these budgets ultimately goes into building physical assets.
You build highways, you build energy infrastructure, and all the systems around them. A lot of that spending ultimately goes into building.”
Germany’s recent infrastructure commitments illustrate the scale of this change.
After Germany passed the half-a-trillion-euro budget, experts estimate that roughly half of it will go directly into infrastructure.
Beyond infrastructure and technology, housing demand is another major force shaping the built environment.
From a social perspective, everyone wants to live in a home. And if you look at major hubs around the world, Sydney, Singapore, London, Madrid, Berlin, Washington, and San Francisco. The need for affordable housing continues to grow everywhere.
All these macro trends are essentially pushing the industry to build faster and more resiliently than ever before.
Where Technology Is Gaining the Most Traction
Across the built environment, a number of technologies are beginning to show real commercial traction. According to Juan, the sector still has enormous room for innovation, but several areas are already scaling quickly.
Every year, Zacua Ventures surveys more than 100 global investors focused on the built environment to understand where capital and innovation are flowing.
According to Juan, the results consistently show growing interest in technologies that address the industry’s biggest structural challenges.
One clear signal is that funding and investor interest in this space have increased every year over the past five to seven years.
The Rise of AI in Construction and Operations
The first major wave is the growing adoption of AI across construction and asset management workflows. For many companies, AI is beginning to serve as a new intelligence layer atop existing systems, such as project management or site management tools.
Everything related to AI deployments, whether from a vertical application or a platform perspective, is gaining real traction.
We’re reaching a point where the intelligence layer is starting to replace some traditional site and project management systems.
The immediate benefits are often tied to productivity and margin protection, but the long-term impact could be even larger. Once organizations adapt to these new systems, Juan believes they will become extremely difficult to replace.
Historically, software plugged into existing workflows. AI might actually rewrite those workflows entirely. Once a team or a company adopts a new AI-powered workflow, it becomes incredibly sticky.
Robotics and the Physical Layer of Construction
A second area seeing significant progress is robotics and automation on construction sites. Early robotics solutions were often general-purpose tools, such as drones used for inspection or monitoring. Over time, more specialized machines began to appear for tasks such as drywall installation and bricklaying.
Today, the sector is entering a new phase driven by labor shortages and advances in physical AI.
At first, we saw technology-agnostic robots deployed on job sites, like drones for inspections. Now we’re seeing a third wave of robotics, task-agnostic robots that address labor scarcity and improve how we physically build and operate assets.
Autonomy is also beginning to emerge in heavy equipment and construction machinery. Examples include autonomous equipment for large-scale construction sites and platforms that can coordinate entire fleets of robots across projects.
We’re starting to see autonomy for large off-road equipment, which wasn’t a reality before. And some platforms can orchestrate entire robot fleets across job sites.
Infrastructure Technology and Energy Efficiency
The third major area of innovation is what Juan calls infrastructure technology, particularly solutions tailored to specific asset classes, such as data centers and energy systems.
As demand for computing infrastructure grows, new technologies are emerging to support the design, construction, and operation of these facilities.
Energy efficiency is also becoming a major priority, particularly in Europe, where policymakers are focusing on retrofitting existing buildings rather than constructing entirely new ones.
In Europe, there is a strong push to retrofit existing buildings rather than demolish and rebuild. Construction accounts for 30-40% of the waste generated across the continent.
As a result, technologies that help upgrade and reposition existing assets are becoming increasingly attractive.
Instead of demolishing and building new structures, the goal is to reposition existing assets and make them future-ready.
What Zacua Ventures Looks for in Startups
When evaluating potential investments, Juan explains that the firm still relies on many of the traditional principles of venture investing. But in the built environment, certain factors become even more critical.
We still focus on the traditional team evaluation. In the built environment, domain expertise matters more than ever.
Founders who deeply understand how construction, infrastructure, or real estate operate often have a significant advantage. At the same time, Zacua Ventures looks for teams that combine industry experience with strong technological capabilities.
Coming from hybrid backgrounds, understanding both the industry and the technology makes a big difference.
Beyond the team itself, the technology must solve a real problem for the industry. However, Juan emphasizes that the firm is not necessarily looking for solutions that completely reinvent how the sector operates.
Fortunately, the scale of the opportunity is enormous. Construction and real estate together represent the two largest industries globally, providing a massive addressable market for companies that manage to gain traction.
We’re lucky that we’re investing in construction and real estate. These are massive markets.
But the real challenge lies in how startups capture value within those markets. The built environment is highly fragmented, with value often distributed among thousands of small players.
These industries are historically highly fragmented, and much of the value comes from smaller players. Because of this, the go-to-market strategy becomes just as important as the product itself.
Sometimes, the one who adopts the technology is not the one who actually captures the value.
That dynamic requires founders to think carefully about how their solution will be adopted across the ecosystem.
Patience, Momentum, and Valuations in the Built Environment
Investing in the built environment often requires a different mindset than investing in traditional software sectors. Adoption cycles tend to be longer, and large industries such as construction and infrastructure can move more slowly than digital markets.
But for Juan, patience should never become an excuse for lack of progress.
There is definitely a segment of this market that demands patience. Patience can be part of the strategy, but it can’t really be an excuse. Even in industries known for slow adoption, the best startups still find ways to demonstrate momentum early on.
The most durable companies always find ways to show progress early, whether that’s converting pilots into real projects, expanding within customers, or showing that the go-to-market motion is getting smoother.
The scale of the industry can sometimes make it difficult for founders and investors to focus on where real value can be captured.
This is the world’s largest industry, and it sits behind almost everything we do in daily life. From the buildings people live and work in to the infrastructure that powers cities, the built environment touches nearly every aspect of society.
Because of this enormous scale, founders must think carefully about how they position themselves within the market.
Sometimes it’s easy to get lost in how big these markets are. The real question is how you capture value. That means clearly defining where the company sits in the value chain and how it reaches customers.
You really need to think about your defensible position, your go-to-market strategy, and how you actually capture value.
At the same time, investor interest in the built environment has grown significantly in recent years, which has pushed valuations higher.
We’re seeing a lot of appetite for the space right now, which is driving valuations up. Part of this momentum comes from the growing number of successful companies emerging from the sector. Several built-environment technology companies have achieved large exits or public listings over the past decade.
If you look at companies like Procore, which stayed private for almost 20 years and is now worth around $10 billion, or companies like Samsara in equipment telematics, they’ve attracted a lot of attention.
All these companies have raised significant capital over the past few years, and that’s attracting more analysts and investors to the space.
Regional Differences in The Built Environment
Although Zacua Ventures invests globally, Juan explains that regional dynamics play a major role in how technologies are adopted across the built environment.
Many of the core challenges, such as productivity, labor shortages, decarbonization, and infrastructure resilience, are universal. However, the way these problems appear in practice often depends on local markets.
The problems are typically global: productivity, sustainability, resilience, and labor shortages. But the constraints on the workflows are usually local.
Because of this, Zacua Ventures structures part of its investment team around geographic expertise, allowing it to better understand how different markets operate.
Our investment team is structured partly by geography because constraints and workflows vary by region.
Europe is actually the only region where robotics is consistently ranked as the top area of interest. This reflects the growing need to replace or supplement manual labor on construction sites.
In other regions, the priorities tend to look different. Rapid urbanization and economic growth are creating strong demand for infrastructure development.
In Asia, there is a huge focus on infrastructure, so technologies connected to infrastructure investment tend to gain traction faster.
Meanwhile, in regions such as Southeast Asia or Latin America, the adoption of new technologies can sometimes move faster when solutions offer clear financial returns.
In some markets, technologies get adopted quickly because the ROI is very clear.
The Role of Regulation in The Built Environment
Construction and real estate are also among the most regulated industries in the world, which means regulatory environments can significantly influence how technologies scale.
We try to avoid regulatory risk. Technologies that are adopted only because regulation forces them are not something we’re particularly excited about.
Instead, we look for solutions that create value independently of regulation, even though policy developments can still shape the broader market.
Sustainability and decarbonization policies are a good example. New regulations and government priorities are increasingly pushing companies to adopt greener technologies.
Within Europe, differing regulations between countries can also create challenges for startups trying to scale across borders.
While initiatives like the EU’s proposed “28th regime” aim to simplify rules for startups more broadly, similar frameworks for the built environment are still limited.
However, Juan notes that most of these efforts are still driven by a mix of public programs and private initiatives, rather than by a single, unified regulatory framework.
So far, we haven’t seen a dramatic simplification of regulation for the built environment across Europe. In our sustainability and decarbonization investments, we’re definitely seeing European-level initiatives helping these solutions scale faster and access public capital.
AI, Automation, and the Future of the Built Environment
Right now, much of the excitement in the built environment centers on artificial intelligence, but Juan notes that applying AI to construction and real estate presents unique challenges.
Unlike many digital industries, the built environment has historically struggled with data standardization and accessibility, making the deployment of AI more complex.
There is a lot of excitement around AI, but construction and real estate are not industries known for strong data practices.
Access to structured, reliable information is often limited, which means many companies are still working to build the data foundations required for advanced AI systems.
Being able to access clean data or well-organized datasets isn’t always straightforward.
Despite these challenges, Juan sees several AI-driven applications gaining traction, particularly vertical AI solutions designed to automate specific processes.
Takeoff software, for example, where AI can extract the materials from drawings, BIM models, or 2D plans, something machines can already do better than humans.
Another trend he finds interesting is the platformization of construction technology.
Historically, the industry relied on isolated tools solving individual problems. But that may be starting to change.
We’re moving from point solutions toward unified operating systems for the industry. AI is helping accelerate that transition by making it easier to integrate multiple processes into a single system.
The technology simply wasn’t ready before, but now AI is unlocking that possibility.
Another area Juan continues to watch closely is decarbonization, as the built environment remains one of the largest sources of global emissions. While sustainability technologies are attracting attention, Juan believes long-term success will depend on clear economic incentives.
Decarbonization on its own is not enough. There needs to be a strong economic case behind it. That value can come from improved efficiency, reduced materials usage, or better building performance.
If you can save materials or improve performance while reducing emissions, then the business case becomes very strong.
Will AI replace humans in the built environment?
Despite rapid technological progress, Juan does not believe the built environment will become fully automated anytime soon.
While AI and robotics can dramatically improve productivity, human expertise will continue to play a crucial role.
“Obviously, we will still need people.”