Jun 27, 2023

The ultimate database of ConTech investors

I’ve been silent on here for 3 weeks since my last post.

Among other AEC-Techies and some legends in the community – Alain Waha of Buro Happold, David Basulto of Archdaily, and various Con-Tech founders – together we kept busy initiating a massive open-source project for founders in AEC-Tech.

The Wallhack launched last Friday, and is something I am convinced will be a massive resource for founders in construction, architecture and engineering technology.

👉 Get the slide deck

The Wallhack is the most objective and curated database of venture capital investors in our space. It focuses on curating VC firms who are actively investing in construction, architecture, engineering, design, skilled labor, blue collar, and supply chain technology for the building world.

The project’s primary mission is to give founders and all other folks interested in the AEC-Tech and Construction-Tech investor landscape a fast and simple tool to research long-standing investors with steady capital in and around AEC-Tech. It aims to maximize the use of objective, curated information, and decrease “fund propaganda” and “PR narratives” (which we know VC’s are not necessarily ashamed of using ;)). So let’s get rid of that propaganda and let the objective facts speak. As a byproduct of all this, The Wallhack also allows investors with relevance for AEC-Tech to provide a useful overview of their investment firm’s affinity, activity and record.

As a result, founders can use The Wallhack to find their dream investors. Simple as that.

Or as Jeevan from OpenSpace put it so eloquently:

Fundraising in construction-tech has a lot of nuance, and successful startups typically bring together different investor types. The Wallhack initiative is making that a reality for more investors and more entrepreneurs.

This becomes a reality because The Wallhack does a few things right in my opinion:

  1. It contains more than 1’000 VC investors who have actively deployed capital in our sector. Not every VC qualifies for the list though. The Wallhack has a quite specific set of criteria for an investor to be featured.
  2. Only objective, curated data from the world’s most reputed VC data pools is used. Investors do not self-curate their numbers. (VC’s can still claim their profile and update their core info, such as URL, team members, content to be featured etc. – but not the quantitative data).
  3. Data is updated weekly across more than 20’000 data points. That is possible because data pipes are automated.
  4. Truly open-source. No monetization, no paywalls, no ads, no tracking.

Something important to all of us initiators was that it becomes a community-driven project that pierces through walls of opacity (hence the nerdy gaming name). Initiated by a bunch of folks who have spent many years in AEC-Tech and Construction-Tech and who all believe in the power of open-source and objective data. We all have day jobs that are somehow embedded in the AEC sectors. The Wallhack is a project we initiated on our evenings and weekends.

I am looking forward to helping the project expand its feature set and scope, and see hopefully thousands of founder teams in our space benefit from the massive resource that The Wallhack is.

I think The Wallhack is off to becoming the default resource for VC/investor research in Construction-Tech and AEC-Tech. Golden times for founders!