ANNOUNCEMENT UPCOMING EVENT
How AI Will Shape Construction

Foundamental, the construction-tech VC behind InfraMarket and a growing portfolio of AEC companies, recently launched Foundamental University: 13 free masterclasses from founders and CxOs across the project economy. We watched the ones most relevant to construction leadership and pulled out the lessons worth sitting with.

Matthias Tauber, Senior Partner at BCG and a civil engineer by training, built the firm's building materials and construction practice from scratch. His hiring rule was straightforward: three non-negotiables before anyone joined the team. They had to take care of each other, hold themselves to a high performance bar, and connect with the industry. He deprioritised deep sector expertise. Industry knowledge can be learned, he argues, but the traits that define how a team works together cannot be retrofitted.

The harder part, Matthias admits, is what happens after hiring. He recalls observing a team member treating male and female colleagues differently, knowing something was off, and letting it slide for a few days because it felt uncomfortable. By the time he addressed it, a woman on the team had already raised the issue herself. His reflection: almost every leader he's spoken to, when asked about their biggest regret, says the same thing. They didn't act fast enough on ‘people decisions’. Exiting someone whose performance or values don't fit is always painful. Doing it late is worse.

Florian Biller, co-founder and CEO of Capmo, learnt this the hard way. Early customer-facing hires lacked domain knowledge, and the results were painful: frustrated employees who weren't taken seriously, and prospects who kept asking to speak to someone more senior.

The fix was structural:

The broader lesson applies well beyond contech. In vertical industries, domain credibility is table stakes.

Dominik von Achten, CEO of Heidelberg Materials, oversaw one of the industry's most significant carbon capture projects in Norway. The plant involved integrating an entirely new chemical process into a cement facility over 100 years old. Dominik's assessment: technology accounted for perhaps 30 to 40% of the project's success. The rest came down to people.

What made the team work:

The persistence required is a reminder that large-scale decarbonisation in construction materials will be won by organisations that treat it as an operational and cultural challenge.

Hendrik Goldbeck, who leads the family-owned Goldbeck group (one of Europe's largest systemised construction companies), has spent two decades pushing a product-based construction model. The analogy is automotive: Goldbeck designs, manufactures, and assembles standardised building systems, procuring elevators in batches of 2,000 rather than one at a time.

The approach demands a different engineering mindset. Solving a one-off problem is straightforward. Solving a scalable, repeatable problem is where the value compounds. Hendrik's concept of a "project nexus," where all data from design through operations live in an integrated environment, points to a future where AI agents operate within that data layer. And his prediction about interfaces is worth noting: voice-driven interaction will eventually kill the front-end app, reducing the technology burden on site managers who are already overloaded.

Shubhankar Bhattacharya, General Partner at Foundamental, tells the story of backing InfraMarket, now one of construction tech's few unicorns. What struck Shub in the very first meeting wasn't a bold vision or an extravagant pitch. It was a spreadsheet. The founders walked through their numbers with precision, showed a company that had always been net profitable, and laid out a plan that felt deliberately understated.

Shub admits he initially passed on the deal, partly because the founder said he'd stay in one city for the next three years. That didn't sound like a future unicorn. It turned out to be a costly mistake. What Shub had underestimated was the compounding power of predictability: a founder who could lay out a numbers-driven plan and then deliver against it, quarter after quarter. For construction tech founders, the lesson cuts against the grain of typical VC storytelling. In an industry built on margins, reliability, and repeat performance, the ability to forecast accurately and execute consistently can be more persuasive than any grand narrative.

David Rockhill, Global Head of Advisory at Arcadis, draws a sharp distinction between ambition-setting and forecasting. An ambitious target is meant to motivate and move an organisation. A forecast is meant to be accurate. Confusing the two leads either to timid targets nobody rallies around or bold claims nobody believes.

David recalls a CEO who set a 15% productivity improvement target for maintenance operations. When asked how he arrived at the number, the answer was simple: they picked one. Then they built the plan underneath it. The lesson for AEC leadership: set the number high enough to force creative thinking, but back it with clear initiatives, accountability, and a baseline people can see themselves moving from.

Andreas Hettich, fourth-generation leader of the Hettich Group (€1.4 billion in revenue, products in most households worldwide), tells a story about entering India. Their first factory build involved a German facilities controller who cut 30% off the Indian contractor's invoice after measuring fewer square metres than claimed. The contractor was furious.

What the German team hadn't understood was the local convention: the purchaser negotiates a very low per-unit price, and the contractor builds slightly more to compensate. After that episode, Andreas handed factory construction entirely to their Indian joint venture partner. The company's India business is now one of its most successful markets globally.

Hendrik echoes the point from a European perspective. Goldbeck's first attempt to enter France by copying the German organisational model failed outright. They eventually succeeded by acquiring a French company and accepting that local culture produces different, equally valid ways of delivering projects.

All 13 masterclasses are free, with no sign-up required. If you lead a construction business, manage a portfolio of projects, or are building technology for the industry, the series is a rare collection of first-hand operating knowledge from people who have actually done the work. Start at university.foundamental.com.

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