Before Juan Nieto co-founded Zacua Ventures, he spent years inside CEMEX Ventures, the corporate venture arm of one of the world’s largest building materials companies, building its Asia-Pacific strategy from scratch and opening its Shanghai office in 2019. That background shapes everything about how he invests today. “Most venture investors underwrite technology,” he says on this episode of Impact Talks. “Very few have sat inside the P&L of the industry they’re trying to transform.”
That distinction is the foundation of Zacua’s thesis: in physical industries, deployment —not the technology itself— is the moat. It’s also where the fund’s origin story begins, as Nieto explains. Early in his CEMEX days, he and his future co-founders noticed that point solutions aimed at one link of construction’s long, fragmented value chain -owners, contractors, subcontractors, material suppliers, OEMs, engineering and design firms- could bring marginal improvements, but rarely moved the needle for the industry as a whole. Changing a $25 trillion system required more than better software. It required an ecosystem: technologists and entrepreneurs on one side, and the world’s largest physical-industry players on the other, able to provide safe pilot environments and a runway to real-world deployment.
That became Zacua Ventures: a global, built-environment-focused fund investing in the technologies powering real estate, construction, infrastructure, and energy, backed by a network of more than 40 corporate partners who double as both investors and test beds. It’s also, Nieto argues, what let Zacua close the loop that most venture funds can’t: sourcing and validating technology, accelerating its go-to-market through corporate relationships, and, in the case of one early portfolio company that scaled from seed to Series B in four years, engineering an exit directly to a strategic partner, Trimble.
Three forces converging at once
Asked why physical industries are having their moment now rather than five or ten years ago, Nieto points to three forces colliding simultaneously. The first is geopolitical fracture: a wave of reconstruction and infrastructure-hardening, from Ukraine to natural-disaster response in Latin America, that has made resilient infrastructure a national priority across developed economies. The second is what he calls “AI dislocation”: more than $500 billion in announced U.S. data center investment alone, a construction boom he compares to the railway era, constrained not by software but by the unglamorous physical inputs -energy, water, cement, steel- needed to actually build the walls around the chips. The third is the reshoring of industrial corridors as the U.S., Europe, and Asia build out parallel, regionalized supply chains, each requiring infrastructure that historically didn’t need to exist.
Inside that opportunity, Zacua organizes its conviction around a handful of buckets: AI for construction workflows, where decades of data captured by architects and engineers is finally flowing down to the jobsite; physical AI, robotics and autonomy, aimed squarely at construction’s defining constraint: a labor shortage so acute that, as Nieto puts it, “here in Spain, we don’t have bricklayers”; and energy-transition infrastructure and materials intelligence, as reshoring and the data center boom collide with a construction industry that still struggles to answer a basic question: where are my materials, right now.
The impact case: prevention and preparedness
For an audience focused on impact, Nieto is direct about where climate fits into the thesis, not as an add-on, but as two concrete investment lenses: prevention and preparedness. Cement and steel together account for roughly 13–14% of global CO2 emissions, enough, he notes, that if concrete were a country, it would rank among the world’s top three emitters, which makes greener materials and better insulation a direct investment category, not a marketing line.
With a global housing shortage already straining every major city, and Ukraine’s reconstruction needs poised to outpace the region’s entire construction capacity, Nieto’s argument is simple: the industry doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for regulation to catch up with a changing climate.
It’s also, he suggests, why capital is finally following: hyperscalers and sovereign-scale investors now need the same water, energy, cement, and steel that construction has needed all along, pulling new, more discerning capital into an industry venture that has largely ignored.
Zacua’s own answer to operating in a market this large has been to stay deliberately close to the ground: a team split across Tokyo, Melbourne, Dubai, Munich, New York, Madrid, San Francisco, and Mexico City, reviewing regional infrastructure budgets and technology readiness every six months, and using its corporate LP base, not as a headline, but as a listening post, to understand which markets, and which problems, are actually ready to be solved.
