🧱 “El tocho no se tira” or in other words: bricks don’t belong in the trash.

The Diari de Tarragona, a regional newspaper in Catalonia, recently profiled Ectos founder Gloria Torne Villasevil and her mission to change how construction sites deal with surplus materials.In 2023, Glòria launched Ectos, one of our portfolio companies, to help construction firms stop treating leftover bricks, tiles, and steel as waste and start managing them as a strategic resource. In Spain, construction and demolition account for around 40% of total waste, yet only about 25% is handled by authorised waste managers: leaving most material underused or dumped illegally. 🇪🇸It is a founder story rooted in family-run construction businesses and local realities, but the ambition is clearly European: build the infrastructure that makes circular construction the default, not the exception.The company’s beginnings were very much a solo journey. “I learned programming by watching YouTube videos,” she says. That was when she built the first basic version of the product, and only a few months later her former high‑school classmate, Oliver Holms, joined the project after, in her words, “falling in love with the product.” Today, they are four partners plus three employees, and “the average age of the team is around 21.”At STYX, this is exactly the kind of urban‑tech story that resonates: practical, grounded in the daily life of cities and builders, and fully aligned with Europe’s push for circularity in the built environment.