Exploring New Horizons: Business Development Strategies in the Construction Industry

What strategies and methodologies do you employ to identify and explore new business development opportunities within the construction industry?

In all industries that we invest in, we usually generate our investment hypotheses and deal flow in two ways. Firstly, we have been able to build up a broad and diversified network over the last few decades and, therefore, receive many opportunities every year. Secondly, we regularly form investment hypotheses on various problems and sectors through so-called industry deep dives. In the construction industry, we have done this on several parts of the value chain or the lifecycle: building materials, particularly the decarbonisation of building materials, the planning and construction of new buildings, and the management and improvement of existing buildings/building portfolios. Here, we find the best solutions for different fields that interest us. Our second channel is inbound deal flow. Here, we often recognise certain patterns and then look at various companies in this environment to identify the best ones. Topics often come up in hype cycles. Of course, we don't try to jump on these immediately, but we try to analyse them for risk/return at a healthy distance.

Can you share your experience from one of the successful new business ventures or initiatives you've participated in in the construction sector?

We invested in the Austrian PropTechstartupOptimuse in October of this year. The founders, Dominik and Fabian, have the vision of disrupting the emissions-heavy real estate industry with their innovative software solutions. To this end, they have developed a platform that allows real estate portfolio holders and managers to analyse their portfolios at scale fully automatically. This can be done with just a few input data points (as data is often hard to come by), but it generates in-depth, technologically sound results in terms of energy efficiency using a generated 3D model. This helps to identify potential stranded assets and to define renovation strategies with the associated budget planning. This allows owners to digitise and dynamically monitor their entire portfolio completely. They also offer transaction-focused companies the opportunity to quickly and cost-effectively review potential energy and cost-efficiency acquisitions. We firmly believe that such a power tool has the potential to revolutionize the still very conservative and non-digitalized real estate industry.

What are the main benefits and challenges of being involved in venture capital activities within the construction industry?

Obviously, the current market situation with sluggish construction activity does not play into the hands of our company's customers. This is even more reason why we, as investors, see a great need to continue to digitize the industry and to support young, innovative companies in doing so. The positive thing is that more and more venture capital companies are involved in PropTech - leading to more capital being available. However, we also see a lack of support for innovation and entrepreneurship, especially in the education of civil engineers and, to a certain extent, architects. In our opinion, there are still not enough incentives and further training courses at universities and colleges to promote entrepreneurship. Many spin-offs from professorships are still strongly tied to the university, which makes sense from the university’s point of view but is more difficult to finance from a venture capital perspective.

In your view, what trends or changes do you foresee in the venture capital landscape concerning the construction industry in the coming years?

We see a growing interest in Urban Tech and PropTech by climate Tech funds, which is not surprising, given the built environment's big impact on the climate. We also see more specialised funds appearing, often financed by the building materials industry.

What advice would you give aspiring entrepreneurs looking to launch a startup in the construction industry, especially in terms of attracting investment and building a viable business model?

We often see a disconnect between solution-oriented and business-model-oriented founders. As so often in our Industrial Deeptech sector, we see founding teams with strong technical backgrounds. Either they have spent years researching together at universities and institutes and then tried to spin off the solution, which is often accompanied by considerable licensing difficulties, or they have come across their solution in their operational business in a larger company and were not allowed to develop it further within the operation. However, both types of founders often lack business acumen in designing the pricing model to generate lucrative margins, identifying the right customer segments, and attracting the right investors for the next financing rounds. And this is exactly where we come in. As an early-stage investor, we want to take our portfolio companies by the hand and share our best practices from past experiences, as well as open up our large industry and investor network to them.

About Matterwave Ventures

Matterwave Ventures is a venture capital firm based in Munich that has specialized in deep-tech innovations with industrial applications for many years and actively invests throughout Europe. As an early-stage investor, the focus lies on the early development stages of technology companies and includes software and hardware-based business models. The goal is to build world-leading companies that drive the future of industrial value creation, primarily through resource efficiency and digitalization. The team’s vision is to regain European technology leadership, production capacity, energy and raw material autonomy. Over the last 20 years, the team has invested in over 60 companies. Matterwave invests in "full stack," from materials and components to complete systems and software solutions. With over EUR 200 million of capital under management, Matterwave typically participates in Seed and Series,a financing rounds across Europe with initial investments between EUR 1-4 million. Including follow-on financing rounds, over EUR 10 million can be invested per portfolio company. https://matterwave.vc 

About Ines Kolmsee

Ines Kolmsee is a Partner at Matterwave Ventures. Before Matterwave, she was on the Executive Board of Aperam SA, a stainless-steel producer headquartered in Luxemburg. Before that, she was CTO at EWE AG, a German utility with a large renewables base. Before that, she was CEO at SKW Stahl- Metallurgie, a formerly private-equity-owned company that she took public in 2006. She also co-founded a startup in the renewable energy space. Ines currently holds board positions in Prysmian SPA, BORALEX Inc, Etex SA and Topsoe. Prior to that, she also served on the boards of Suez SA, Fuchs Petrolub SE, Umicore SA and Deutsche Telekom SE. Ines holds a master’s degree in Process and Energy Engineering from TU Berlin, a diploma from the Ecole des Mines de St.Etienne, and an MBA from INSEAD. Ines’ investment focus is energy, resource efficiency and industrial decarbonization.