< Back to Blogs
Share:

Investing at the Seams: Rachel Holt of Construct Capital on AI, Visibility, and the Race to Transform Foundational Industries

From Uber to Foundational Industries

At Manifest 2026, Scott Luton sat down with Rachel Holt, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Construct Capital, to explore how venture capital is fueling the next era of supply chain innovation.

Construct Capital, now six years old, was founded in early 2020 with a bold thesis: transform foundational industries that represent nearly half of GDP: supply chain, logistics, manufacturing, mobility, infrastructure, and defense.

When the fund launched, Holt recalls many skeptics asking whether supply chain and logistics were truly venture-scale opportunities. It echoed what she heard when she joined Uber in 2011, when transportation was considered slow moving and heavily regulated. Yet Uber went on to redefine personal logistics.

Her final years at Uber brought a pivotal lesson. While the rides business operated with second-by-second visibility, the company’s e-bike and scooter supply chain operated in near darkness. Products shipped from China would disappear for weeks at sea, briefly reappear at ports, then stall again in customs. “We had no visibility, we had no ability to reroute,” Holt shared, as this Eureka moment would go on to help shape her investment focus.

 

The Visibility Gap at the Seams

Supply chain, Holt emphasized, is not monolithic. “It is literally a chain.” The biggest breakdowns often occur at the seams; between tools, platforms, and stakeholders.

While vertical solutions are thriving, horizontal integration remains complex. Bringing multiple stakeholders onto a single platform is difficult, but the opportunity to close visibility gaps across the full chain is enormous.

Entrepreneurs are stepping into that opportunity, building both focused vertical tools and broader infrastructure platforms to connect fragmented systems.

 

AI: Beyond Labor Efficiency

If 2025 was defined by volatility, 2026 is shaping up as the year of practical AI adoption.

“We are getting much more signal from customers around how they’re using AI this year,” Holt explained. The shift is notable: AI is moving beyond labor efficiency and into direct spend optimization.

Rather than simply making procurement teams incrementally more efficient, AI platforms are driving better rates across tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in spend. The opportunity lies in transforming major cost centers, not just trimming overhead.

Much of AI’s value in supply chain is tied to risk mitigation: rerouting when disruptions occur and ensuring resilience when something inevitably breaks.

 

Startups vs. Incumbents: A Two-Sided Race

Holt described a dynamic tension between startups and large enterprises.

For startups, the challenge is speed; winning customers and turning pilots into sticky, long-term adoption. For large companies, the risk is falling behind.

The AI-first era is lowering adoption barriers. Usage-based pricing, shorter implementation cycles, and modular deployments allow companies to start small, prove value, and scale quickly.

At the same time, big organizations must balance decentralized experimentation with data governance and security, a long-term tension that will shape how innovation unfolds.

 

Unleashing What’s Next

Construct Capital’s role is to back the entrepreneurs driving that transformation. With more than 50 portfolio companies across foundational industries, the firm is investing in automation, AI-enabled systems, logistics intelligence, and next-generation mobility.

Many AI tools now sit alongside existing teams, capturing institutional knowledge and productizing it for the next generation of workers.

In a world defined by volatility and accelerating capability, the race is not only about invention; it is about integration and execution.

As Holt’s journey illustrates, even industries once labeled ‘boring’ can be redefined. The next frontier lies in closing the seams, embracing AI-first thinking, and investing in the entrepreneurs bold enough to transform foundational industries.

 

Where to Learn More

Connect with Rachel Holt on LinkedIn, as well as on email: rachel@constructcap.com. Follow Construct Capital on LinkedIn here and learn more via the company website: https://www.constructcap.com/

More Blogs

semiconductor materials supply
Blogs
March 25, 2026

The Geopolitics of Junk

written by Deborah Dull, on site at GreenBiz 2026   I spent today in a room full of people who think about waste for a living. And the word that kept coming up had nothing to do with recycling. It was sovereignty. Here is the situation. The United States imports 95% of its critical mineral supply. Lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements, the stuff inside every battery, every semiconductor, every electric motor. We do not make it, we do not mine much of it, and we do not control the supply chain that delivers it. That is not an energy policy problem. That is a national security problem. Now here is the part that should make you put down your coffee. A ton of smartphones contains dramatically more gold than a ton of mined ore. We are talking about concentrations that make urban mining look like a gold rush compared to digging in the ground. And yet the recovery rate for those materials, once a phone leaves its first owner, drops to around 13%. We are losing roughly 80% of the value sitting in devices right now, in drawers, in closets, in landfills. E-waste is also the fastest growing waste stream…
operations
Blogs
July 31, 2025

5 questions I frequently get asked about automating operations with AI

Special Guest Blog Post written by Parabola Founder & CEO, Alex Yaseen   Operators are under pressure. They’re expected to move faster, do more with less, and somehow keep everything running smoothly while their systems, tools, and data are a mess. Now, AI is adding a whole new layer. On one hand, it’s exciting. The potential is real. On the other, a lot of teams feel stuck. They know they should be using AI, but they’re not sure where it fits into their day-to-day work. These are the five questions I get asked most often—whether someone’s trying to get started with automation, or trying to figure out how AI actually helps. 1. Can we automate this, or is it too messy? This question usually comes from someone deep in a spreadsheet that was never meant to scale. The short answer is: yes, you can probably automate it. But the longer answer is that you’ll need to rethink the process first. AI can help summarize, transform, and clean data—but it won’t fix a broken workflow. That’s on you. The best teams pair structured automation with lightweight AI to get leverage. Think: using rules and logic to standardize a workflow, and AI…