Austrian construction giant STRABAG has officially launched its long-awaited corporate venture arm. Under the name Loom Ventures, a new early-stage fund with a volume of 100 million euros is entering the market, focused on European InfraTech startups. As Trending Topics reported back in 2025, the construction giant with 86,000 employees had already been working on its own startup fund at the time and had begun recruiting for a Managing Director.

The structure behind it: STRABAG Venture Capital GmbH

According to its imprint, Loom Ventures is backed by STRABAG Venture Capital GmbH, headquartered in Vienna. It is a 100% subsidiary of Bau Holding Beteiligungs GmbH, which in turn belongs to Strabag. At launch, the company was endowed with share capital of 48 million euros.

The firm positions itself as a purely financially investing VC without a strategic mandate — any collaboration with STRABAG is, according to its own statements, optional and not a condition for investment. At the same time, the fund promises its portfolio companies direct access to one of Europe’s largest infrastructure groups through its industry partner STRABAG.

The Management Team

Loom Ventures is led by two Managing Directors with international VC experience:

Ilja Aizenberg (Managing Director) comes from M Ventures, the corporate VC arm of Merck with over 1 billion euros under management. The physicist with a doctorate in semiconductor physics brings a deep-tech background with a focus on sensing, industrial data, enterprise AI, and secure compute.

Toba Spiegel (Managing Director) most recently worked at Trill Impact and has more than ten years of experience in early- and growth-stage investing. His focus is on companies that tightly integrate software with physical assets and operational processes.

The team is completed by Ervin Smajic as Senior Associate, who joined Loom Ventures from T.Capital (the corporate VC arm of Deutsche Telekom with over 2 billion euros). His focus is on Physical AI and cybersecurity.

Investment Thesis: Three Pillars of InfraTech

Loom Ventures positions itself as a European early-stage fund for the category of InfraTech. It invests in companies that make infrastructure more autonomous, more capable, and more resilient. The thesis is structured around three verticals:

• Digital: Data centers, communications technology, software for grid management, and orchestration platforms — compute and AI as the new infrastructure.
• Energy: Power electronics, materials, software-defined grid hardware, and storage systems — in other words, the transformation of electricity generation, storage, and balancing.
• Industrial: Automation and intelligence for the physical economy, from manufacturing robotics to systems for maintaining critical assets.

Ticket Sizes, Stages, and Region

The fund invests at the Seed and Series A stage with initial tickets between 1 and 5 million euros. The geographic focus is on Europe. At this point in time, Loom Ventures has no publicly communicated portfolio — according to its own account, the fund is currently in the active sourcing phase.

Context

With Loom Ventures, STRABAG joins a growing group of Austrian corporations that have discovered corporate venture capital. As Trending Topics reported in 2025, Red Bull Ventures had launched at the same time, while Uniqa Ventures was winding down. Earlier direct investments by STRABAG — such as in the German construction logistics company Schüttflix or the 100-million-euro investment in EnergyTech company CMBlu Energy — had already demonstrated the group’s interest in startup investments in the infrastructure space. With Loom Ventures, these activities now have an institutional home.

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