AI transforms Latin American construction as Zacua Ventures backs 20+ contech startups

Latin America's construction industry has long been a paradox: one of the world's largest economic sectors, yet stubbornly resistant to the digital tools that have transformed nearly every other major business. The numbers tell the story. While construction rivals financial services in sheer scale across the region, companies spend barely one or two percent of their revenue on innovation. That gap is about to close, and fast.

The pressure is mounting from every direction. Material costs are climbing. Coordination between suppliers, builders, and developers grows more chaotic by the month. Millions of families still lack adequate housing. These converging crises are finally forcing the industry to reckon with decades of technological neglect. At a recent Proptech Latam Summit, Margarita de la Peña, the Latin American lead for global venture fund Zacua Ventures, laid out the case plainly: the construction sector has reached an inflection point. The firm has already written checks to more than twenty contech startups across the region, betting that the moment of transformation is now.

The first wave of change is happening in design and preconstruction. For years, sophisticated planning tools like Building Information Modeling—BIM—remained locked behind high barriers of technical expertise and cost. Only the largest infrastructure projects could justify the investment. Artificial intelligence is changing that calculus entirely. AI now allows builders to generate digital twins of projects quickly, run architectural simulations in days instead of weeks, and analyze market conditions—density, building heights, green space—with speed that was impossible before. Developers can now process enormous volumes of technical data in weeks, giving them the agility to bid on projects they could never have evaluated in time under the old system.

But design is only part of the problem. Latin America's construction sector is fragmented into thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises, a structure that breeds opacity. Prices fluctuate without clear logic. Delivery times slip. Everything runs on relationships and handshake deals. This fragmentation creates cascading inefficiencies up and down the supply chain. Zacua Ventures has identified specialized marketplaces as a key solution. The firm backed Construex, a platform that aggregates construction materials, equipment, and labor. The company now operates across fourteen countries—essentially the entire Spanish-speaking world—and has digitized relationships with more than two million material suppliers. By bringing transparency and standardization to procurement, these platforms are beginning to dissolve the friction that has always characterized construction logistics in the region.

Perhaps the deepest problem, though, is financing. Banks in Latin America have historically been wary of construction. They don't fully understand the industry's cycles. They struggle to assess risk. This caution has real consequences: a substantial portion of construction in the region happens through self-building, where individuals construct their own homes without access to formal credit. Suppliers end up absorbing the financial risk, extending payment terms of thirty, sixty, or ninety days to builders who may struggle to pay. Fintech solutions are emerging to address this gap. By giving suppliers data-driven tools to manage credit risk intelligently, these platforms can expand access to capital for builders and developers who would otherwise be locked out of the system.

At the administrative level, the transformation is equally stark. Many construction companies still rely on Excel spreadsheets or rigid enterprise resource planning systems to manage their operations. They struggle with basic financial visibility—invoicing, payroll, sales tracking, cash flow. Zacua Ventures has backed Lebane, a platform operating in Argentina and Mexico that consolidates all of a company's financial and operational management into a single system. The platform integrates with WhatsApp, making it easy for workers and managers to share information naturally, without forcing them into unfamiliar software interfaces. For builders who know how to construct but lack robust daily financial oversight, this kind of tool can be transformative.

What's emerging across these solutions is a pattern: technology that meets the construction industry where it actually is, rather than demanding it transform overnight into something it's not. The industry is fragmented, relationship-driven, and skeptical of complexity. The startups Zacua is backing understand this. They're not trying to replace the industry's culture; they're trying to give it the visibility, speed, and access it needs to survive in a region where material costs keep rising and housing demand keeps growing. Whether that's enough to close the innovation gap remains to be seen. But for the first time in decades, the pressure to change is real, and the tools to do it are finally arriving.