I’m excited to announce that Gregg Wallace is now a partner here at Building Ventures. Since joining the firm in 2021, Gregg has been instrumental in building our strategic investor program, managing construction tech deal flow, advancing industry relationships, and supporting our portfolio companies while nurturing promising startups.
Prior to joining Building Ventures, Gregg spent almost a decade at global construction products leader Hilti, and it was during Gregg’s time launching Hilti’s corporate venture capital team that Travis and I first met him. While collaborating with Gregg, Travis and I grew to understand the potential of building our own organized program for industry investors. Gregg helped us envision how we could best serve as our strategic partners’ eyes and ears looking out for the most relevant industry startups in support of their innovation goals, while they could provide valuable perspectives to us as industry leaders. We knew that achieving this balance for our industry investors would be critical to the next stage of Building Ventures, specifically with the launch of our second fund, and we were excited when Gregg joined us to formalize this effort.
Since joining our firm, Gregg has helped us advance those early ideas into a structured program. Thanks to Gregg, our strategic investor program provides our industry investors a unique aperture on the market while enabling us to size up the investment potential of startups given their role as possible customers.
This structure has proved instrumental for our team, as well as our partners. “McKinstry and our Dawson Ventures practice has a portfolio of companies we’re investing in, and the Building Ventures partnership is a strategic part of that focus on impactful innovation for our industry,” shared McKinstry’s VP of Dawson Ventures Matt Wegworth. “The access and insight to truly innovative companies that the network, the BV team, and Gregg brings us has been really phenomenal. Gregg helps ensure our that our team can get an early ‘first pass’ look at some of the startups most relevant to our business through focused introductions.”
This spirit of collaboration is central to our mission to create a better built world here at Building Ventures. The strategic investment program is at the core of the Building Ventures Innovators Network, or BVIN. When Travis and I started Building Ventures, we consciously chose to curate this network of industry leading minds from across the building lifecycle—including from our industry investors—collaborate to help move industry innovation forward. Now, the BVIN has 150 members who gather at semi-annual BVIN Summits and keep up with content and community members through our online BVIN platform.
Gregg provided an overview of the market during our BVIN Spring Summit 2022 at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.
There is not a single day that goes by without a new startup asking us to consider funding them. In fact, the real rate is many multiples of that. This is great—we want any entrepreneur innovating in the built environment to reach out to us. But it also means that parsing through that volume of startups in a diligent, respectful manner is integral to our jobs. Gregg leads this effort for our contech team in that regard.
In some cases, the team identifies promising entrepreneurs who aren’t the perfect fit for initial investment, but who are working to innovate critical aspects of the industry. We want to stay in touch with these entrepreneurs as a part of our nurture portfolio, and Gregg helps to manage this as a part of our contech team. Working with these entrepreneurs may help develop them as an investment match over time, or perhaps we have just helped them succeed in their own way. Either way, these relationships are important for the industry—and for our strategic investors. Gregg’s work in helping to guide our nurture portfolio while connecting them to our strategic investors is indispensable to our mission as a leading industry investor, and it’s another one of the reasons he is now a partner at Building Ventures.
Gregg’s commitment to industry relationships extends beyond our deal flow, as well. Gregg is involved with demo days from groups such as Techstars, Plug & Play, MassRobotics, ImagineH20, and Harvard Business School, and he regularly attends staple industry conferences such as Autodesk University, Procore Groundbreak, Advancing Prefab, and BuiltWorlds. In addition, Gregg has worked with industry groups like SWACCA and TAUC that are keen to stay ahead on the latest startup trends.
Vice President of TAUC Todd Mustard has collaborated with Gregg on TAUC’s annual Industrial Grade Innovation (IGI) Conference, specifically to help build out their IGI Startup Battle and assist in judging the finals. “Keeping a finger on the pulse of innovations coming out of the tech ecosystem matters to TAUC members,” Todd said. “Gregg brings expertise, perspective, and assisted in facilitating introductions to startup founders like Fraser Patterson of Skillit, a labor recruiting platform. Gregg is someone we rely on as a thought leader in all things construction tech and innovation, and he has been great at engaging with our members.”
Gregg ran a workshop on startup-led innovation at the annual gathering of the Signatory Wall and Ceiling Contractors Alliance.
While we take seriously our broader industry role at Building Ventures, at the end of the day, we are investors. Gregg’s leadership of our strategic investor program helps provide the fuel for our investments, but it is his growing work on behalf of our portfolio companies working to ensure their success with both our limited partners and more broadly in the market that will make a difference in returns for all of those involved.
As you can tell, Gregg is vital to our success as a firm and in supporting our investors and portfolio companies in their missions, as well. That’s why we are thrilled to recognize his contribution to date and role going forward by promoting him to partner at Building Ventures.
If you think Gregg can help you or you are interested in learning more about Building Ventures, please reach out to him on LinkedIn or Twitter.
