Accelerate payments, amplify growth. The financial plumbing the construction trades never had.
A roofing crew needs $40,000 of materials by Friday. The supplier wants payment up front. The contractor won't get paid by the homeowner for sixty days. For most of construction history, that gap was where small businesses went to die - on the back of a napkin, in a stack of unpaid invoices, in a phone call to a bank that said no. BlueTape sits in that gap. It pays the supplier now, lets the contractor pay later, and turns a cash-flow crisis into a checkout button.
Today BlueTape is a payments and financing platform aimed squarely at the people who actually build things: lumber and building-material suppliers, manufacturers, dealers, contractors and the subcontractors under them. More than 6,000 businesses have signed on. It is not a flashy consumer app. It is, more honestly, a back office - one that quietly decides who gets credit, who gets paid, and how fast.
Construction runs on trust and terms. BlueTape turned both into software.- The throughline of this story
Construction is enormous and, financially, weirdly stuck in the past. The US industry moves more than a trillion dollars a year, yet the small firms that make up most of it still chase invoices by fax, extend credit on a handshake, and wait months to be paid. Banks find them too small and too lumpy to underwrite. Suppliers want cash but lose sales when they demand it. The result is a permanent squeeze: plenty of work, never enough working capital.
The cruel irony is that the businesses with the most physical assets - trucks, crews, half-built houses - often have the least access to credit. A general contractor can be profitable on paper and broke on Thursday. That contradiction is the engine of the whole story, and BlueTape exists to resolve it.
Net-30 invoices that stretch to net-90. Manual collections. A supplier eating the risk of non-payment, or refusing terms and losing the deal. Days Sales Outstanding measured in months.
Between "materials needed now" and "homeowner pays later" sits an interest-free loan the contractor is forced to make - to everyone but themselves.
Above: the oldest financing instrument in construction is the unpaid invoice. BlueTape would rather it not be.
The firms with the most to build had the least access to credit. That backwards math is the whole pitch.- On why BlueTape exists
BlueTape's origin is a deliberate pairing of two people who rarely end up in the same room. Yaser Masoudnia spent more than a decade as a licensed general contractor - he has lived the Friday cash crunch firsthand - and had already co-founded and exited a cybersecurity company, NoPassword. Patrick Gannon came from the other side of the ledger entirely: Wells Fargo, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Visa, LendingClub and Uplift, with an MIT engineering degree and a Wharton MBA to match.
Their bet was specific. Not "let's disrupt construction," but: the financial tools the Fortune 500 takes for granted - instant credit decisions, automated receivables, flexible terms - could be packaged for a roofing supplier in Michigan. Build the underwriting once, embed it everywhere materials are sold, and you change who gets to grow.
12+ years a licensed general contractor before fintech. Co-founded and exited cybersecurity startup NoPassword. Knows the cash crunch because he lived it.
Fintech operator out of Wells Fargo, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Visa, LendingClub and Uplift. MIT and Wharton. The credit-risk brain to Yaser's job-site instincts.
One has poured concrete. The other has priced risk for a living. The company is the argument that you need both.
One founder had nailed shingles to a roof. The other had underwritten billions. BlueTape is what happens when they stop arguing and start shipping.- On the partnership
BlueTape is less a single product than a toolkit bolted onto the moment money changes hands. A supplier can offer net terms up to 120 days without carrying the risk. A contractor can buy materials at any store with a BlueTape virtual card and pay back over time. An accounts-receivable team can replace manual chasing with an automated portal that, the company says, can drop Days Sales Outstanding to a single day.
The clever part is the placement. BlueTape embeds where the decision already happens - in a supplier's checkout, inside construction-management software, on an e-commerce store - so financing stops being a separate trip to the bank and becomes a button.
Suppliers extend net terms; BlueTape carries the risk and pays them fast.
Finance building-supply invoices at any materials store - buy now, pay later.
Automated order-to-cash that can pull DSO down toward one day.
Turn outstanding invoices into immediate working capital.
Suppliers get cash early while customers keep their flexibility.
Business credit lines for qualifying contractors, remodelers and builders.
Automated decisioning and limits that cut non-payment risk and bureau costs.
Net-terms checkout embedded into suppliers' online stores and marketplaces.
Debuts a digital payments platform built specifically for the construction industry, under parent entity LinqPal, Inc.
Rolls out buy-now-pay-later financing so contractors can buy materials and repay suppliers over time.
Closes $5M seed (Chicago Ventures) plus $50M in debt (Arcadia Funds) to expand lending capacity and team.
Adds business lines of credit and a virtual card that finances supply invoices at any materials store.
Raises a Series A round to keep scaling the platform across more suppliers and trades.
Ties in with NEMEON, Buildxact and a growing roster of suppliers offering BlueTape terms at checkout.
The pitch to a supplier is not charity - it's math. Offer flexible terms through BlueTape and you sell more, get paid faster, and stop carrying the risk yourself. The company's own figures frame the trade clearly: collections that once dragged for weeks compress to about a day, and suppliers report meaningful jumps in sales when "pay later" appears at checkout.
A chart is just a chart until a supplier's bank balance agrees with it. BlueTape is betting it will.
Sell more, get paid sooner, hand off the risk. The supplier keeps the customer; BlueTape keeps the worry.- The business model, in one line
The proof also shows up in partners. BlueTape struck an official deal with the buying cooperative NEMEON to offer members exclusive trade credit, and integrated with Buildxact so financing lives inside the software builders already use for estimating and project management. Suppliers like CPF Floors and Big Rapids Lumber & Hardware now offer BlueTape net terms directly at checkout - distribution that turns a fintech feature into an everyday habit.
BlueTape frames its mission plainly: make financing and payments accessible to growing construction businesses, so that a small firm has the same financial tools as a large one. The internal phrasing - "innovation driven by care" - sounds soft until you remember the alternative it replaces, which is a contractor personally guaranteeing materials and losing sleep over a homeowner's slow check.
The company likes to say it is a partner to the trades, not just a vendor to them. That is the kind of thing every company says. What gives it some weight here is that one of the founders has actually stood on the roof, and the product is built to remove the specific indignities he remembers.
We have had enormous demand from construction businesses for our services since we launched.- Yaser Masoudnia, Co-Founder & CEO
Construction is being asked to do more - housing shortages, infrastructure spending, an aging trade workforce - with the same threadbare financial tooling it has always had. Inflation made materials more expensive; supply chains made them harder to time. Every one of those pressures lands first on the small firm's cash flow. A company that smooths that flow doesn't just help a contractor; it nudges whether a house gets built on schedule at all.
BlueTape will not be the only one chasing this. Billd, Resolve, Balance, Slope and the supplier house-account itself all want the same checkout moment. The advantage BlueTape is pressing is bundling - credit, payments, AR, factoring and e-commerce in one place - plus distribution through the cooperatives and software builders already trust. Whether that compounds into a durable franchise is the open question, and the honest one.
Return to Friday. The roofing crew needs $40,000 in materials. The supplier still wants paying. The homeowner still owes for sixty days. The gap hasn't gone anywhere - it never will. What's changed is that the contractor no longer stares into it. There's a button now. He taps it, the supplier gets paid, the crew loads the truck, and the only thing missing from the scene is the panic.
The gap between "needed now" and "paid later" is permanent. BlueTape's whole job is to make it boring.- Where the story lands