Circularity, sustainability provide opportunities: VC lead

Eduardo Gomez is looking for contech partners.

As head of CRH Ventures, the contech investment arm of Dublin-based building materials firm CRH, Gomez is seeking founders who want to partner and work together to get to market.

The VC has made seven investments, including sustainable cement manufacturer Sublime Systems and carbon capture company Cool Planet Technologies, with more to come. It also runs three different accelerator programs for startups, in water, roads and sustainable building materials.

Here, Gomez talks with Construction Dive about what, specifically, the firm is looking for in startups, the results of previous accelerator cohorts, and what he sees as the big construction technology areas to watch in 2025.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

CONSTRUCTION DIVE: As the corporate investment arm of CRH, what companies are you investing in?

EDUARDO GOMEZ: We’ve raised our first, $250 million fund. We’re using that money to invest in companies across the water, decarbonization, circularity and productivity spaces.

We’re looking to identify great companies that we can partner with, and our idea is not only to think about investing in companies, but more broadly, how do we partner with these companies? We think that investment is one of the ways in which we can do that.

For instance, we love it when we can support founders and management financially through an equity investment, but also where we can take that solution to market.

Ultimately, all of this keeps our operations centered. Our portfolio is very well connected to our business, and therefore to our customers. Everything that we do keeps the customer at the core. So we’re excited when we see that come to life.

How do the accelerators fit into your investment strategy?

As part of our investment process, we look for ways to identify companies and collaborate. In addition to investing, we like to establish commercial relationships with the companies that we partner with. The accelerator program is a great example of that.

We’re now in our third cohort of the accelerator programs. We started with our first program in the water space. Then, we did one all around roads. We are now in the middle of our third cohort, all around sustainable building materials. That one is very much connected to our different businesses in Europe and the Americas.

The idea is to facilitate engagement between founders and startups with large strategic players in different spaces. And from there, many things can happen.

We identify opportunities to pilot and help the companies accelerate their scaling process, and we validate their solutions and their offerings with our teams and partners.

How did the previous accelerator cohorts turn out?

All of them have gone pretty well, so we keep doing them.

Every time, we’re looking to improve, to learn what we can do better and differently.

But the main headline from each program has been great engagement from startups. The application is quite straightforward, it’s not cumbersome. For the applicants, they are very much excited to see that when we connect, we’re bringing our full team — CRH — to the table.

It’s not only the venture side, but we have people who are experts in their fields, who are connecting with them, giving them ideas, validating their solutions.

The pilots, as you can anticipate, some do better than others. We’ve invested in some companies from those programs. But overall, we’re very pleased and very excited to see the progress we’ve made. 

What are the big technologies you’re keeping an eye on in 2025?

There’s a big opportunity with new materials, and that’s why we launched this program. We believe this space still has a big area for disruption, and there’s still great opportunities for new players to come into the space, whether they pursue circularity or decarbonization. The demand is there.

In other spaces, we think everything around robotics is going to continue to develop when you look at some of the big themes in our industry. The labor shortage continues to be an issue. Demand is growing, and so we think that robotics can accelerate the way we think about our construction process.

Whether it’s on the job site or on the procurement side, we think robotics is going to play a big role and we’re going to see, potentially, some migration from other industries that have adopted robotics already, much more than we have.

Think about what we’ve seen in the automotive industry. I think some of that can move into our space.