Lucas Carné and the problem that money could not build away

By 2019, Lucas Carné had time to notice who was leaving. Friends from the Barcelona neighbourhood where he had grown up were finding homes elsewhere, sometimes outside the city altogether. He had sold a company that helped people buy things more affordably. Around him, the purchase that shaped almost everything else was becoming harder to make.

Privalia, the online fashion outlet he had founded with José Manuel Villanueva, had been acquired by Vente-Privee in 2016. The founders left in 2018. Carné took time with his family, and housing became a persistent question: why did building and renovating remain so costly, unpredictable and difficult? A successful exit had bought him freedom over his working life. It had supplied no useful shortcut through a construction schedule.

The choice that followed gives his career its peculiar shape. Having helped move the fashion outlet onto a screen, he joined a business concerned with walls, timber, contractors and deliveries that require considerably more clearance than a parcel. In 2020, he and Villanueva co-founded 011h with other partners. Their proposition was to connect industrialised building components with digital coordination, making housing construction more reliable and sustainable.

There is an appealing absurdity to this transition. An internet entrepreneur leaves retail and discovers that his next customer would quite like a roof. But the continuity matters: both businesses ask how a complicated chain of suppliers and operations can produce something a customer will trust.

A small office, a very large wardrobe

Carné was born in Barcelona in 1971. His training combined mechanical engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya with business education at IESE and Northwestern’s Kellogg School. Before Privalia, he worked at Bain & Company. There he met Villanueva, beginning a partnership that would outlast their first company and eventually carry them into a different industry.

Privalia launched in 2006. Its commercial idea was readily understood: brands had surplus stock; customers wanted recognised labels at lower prices. A members’ club could bring the two together through sales available for a limited period. The deadline supplied urgency, while the arrangement gave brands another route to sell goods. Behind an apparently simple shopping experience sat the less glamorous work of securing stock and fulfilling orders.

In a 2010 interview, the founders described an initial investment of €100,000, followed by €300,000 from external partners in November 2006. Those numbers put the later acquisition into perspective. Privalia began as a small, financed experiment, with another round of practical decisions always waiting behind the last one.

Its physical expansion offered a useful measure of the change. The early office was on Barcelona’s Portal de l’Àngel. By 2012, the business occupied a large space in the city’s 22@ district and had expanded into Italy, Brazil and Mexico. The company’s online shop had acquired a substantial geography.

An internationalisation yearbook recorded first-year sales of €400,000 and, six years later, turnover above €300 million, more than a thousand employees and 11 million customers. Three-quarters of revenue came from outside Spain. Local presence in its markets helped the company stay close to both brands and buyers. The website travelled; the relationships still required people.

The shoes were part of the company

For a less solemn view of Privalia, consider a pair of trainers. At an e-commerce event in 2010, a fashion blogger spotted Carné wearing black-and-red Munich Goal shoes. After missing him at the venue, the blogger found him about to take a taxi and asked for a photograph.

The colours were unfamiliar for a reason. The shoes were a special edition made for Privalia’s people as a corporate Christmas present. Carné explained the connection and his fondness for the Catalan brand. It is a small anecdote, but a useful one: a company selling fashion had managed to put a little of its own identity on its founder’s feet.

The partnership had a more consequential practical detail. Carné later described spending much of his time on financing while Villanueva concentrated on running the business. Two founders could cover demands that would have pulled one person in opposite directions. Their shared background helped; dividing the work gave the relationship a daily purpose.

Knowing when to leave the shop

Vente-Privee acquired Privalia in April 2016. The deal is widely reported at around €500 million, a company transaction rather than a statement of Carné’s personal wealth. He and Villanueva stayed through a period of growth and integration before handing executive responsibility to Fabio Bonfà in November 2018.

Speaking that month, Carné treated the timing of a sale as a question of how much value a company could keep creating independently. Markets mature. Competition becomes more expensive. The appetite of investors changes. A founder who waits for an entirely comfortable moment may wait beyond the useful one.

“It’s better to be left wondering if it was too soon,” he said. The remark has the dry practicality of someone who has already had to make the decision. Selling a business ends one form of uncertainty and creates another: what deserves the years that follow?

Carné also had experience beyond the retailer’s public image. Within the Vente-Privee group, he led a distributed data science team working on the use of information in commerce. Pricing, demand and customer experience offered operational questions for technology to answer. That work provides a bridge to the coordination problems he would take on at 011h.

“It’s better to be left wondering if it was too soon.”

Lucas Carné, on selling a company, 2018

A building has to agree with its software

The construction venture brought him back toward the physical world of his engineering education. At 011h, prefabricated components, integrated design and construction, and a digital platform are intended to work together. The ambition depends on decisions lining up across a project, from drawings and procurement to the order in which work happens on site.

The company’s early projects make that proposition tangible. Habitat Hospitalet, developed with Renta Corporación, contained eight homes. Fioresta, with AEDAS Homes in Alicante, comprised 51. Casernes in Barcelona added 56 protected homes with the municipal housing body IMHAB. A small first building was followed by larger residential assignments, each involving real developers and a place people could live.

These projects also give a more useful scale than a sweeping promise about transforming an industry. Eight homes mean eight households. Fifty-six protected homes put the method into public housing. The work has to satisfy the ordinary obligations of construction while the company develops its system around it.

Carné’s description of adoption is refreshingly practical. Construction workers move around. They perform manual tasks. A digital product has to fit that setting. “La tecnología tiene que ser fácil de usar,” he said in 2024: technology has to be easy to use. An additional administrative burden can defeat an otherwise clever feature.

He has described tools that let architects access a component library while continuing to use familiar design software, and QR codes that help workers identify components on site. Those details matter because the friction occurs between professions. A design decision must become something a supplier can manufacture and a team can assemble.

The early emphasis on timber supplied another part of the approach, alongside the ambition to reduce a building’s carbon footprint. Yet the wider business is about coordinating a construction system. Choosing materials, ordering components and sequencing work have to form a usable whole. A beautifully specified wall remains an awkward possession if it arrives at the wrong time.

The next number is a delivery date

Capital has followed the experiment. In July 2022, 011h announced a €25 million Series A led by Redalpine, with participation from Seaya Andromeda, Breega and existing investors. An additional €20 million round was reported in October 2025, with Ship2B Ventures and CDTI among the participants. These were investments in the company’s development, carrying expectations that buildings and software would advance together.

On 15 September 2026, AXIS, the ICO group’s venture capital manager, announced plans to invest up to €12 million through FOND-ICO Crecimiento alongside private funds. The announced ceiling describes the proposed investment. The stated uses include developing the platform, expanding operations and progressing toward a system that third parties could eventually use.

Carné’s 2026 public account of growth remains instructive because he distinguishes starts from ambition. He described one project started annually in 2021, 2022 and 2023, two in 2024 and three in 2025. For 2026, he set out a target of ten starts and said four were already under way when he posted. A forecast has its own place in the ledger.

In his April 2026 conversation with Itnig, he returned to integration, industrialisation, software and the difficulty of scaling construction. His public writing has also explored how accumulated project data and operating knowledge might support artificial intelligence. The attraction is a feedback loop: each completed job can teach the organisation something about the next.

For Carné, the second business has brought the question back to Barcelona’s departing friends: can more reliable construction contribute to housing people can afford? He has chosen to spend his freedom working on that possibility. The proof will accumulate in occupied homes, in schedules kept and in projects whose costs behave themselves. After a career of selling things with a deadline, he has found a deadline that arrives with scaffolding.