Clad wires the job site to the invoice.

The Least Sexy Software in the Broadband Boom Might Be the Most Necessary

There is a genre of company that is boring in the specific way that money is boring - which is to say, not boring at all once you notice that everyone involved is quietly terrified about cash flow. Clad is one of those companies.

Here is a thing about building fiber optic networks, or power lines, or any of the physical infrastructure that the modern economy runs on top of and mostly forgets about: the work happens in a trench, and the money happens in a spreadsheet, and the two are connected by a heroic amount of human effort that is, in the year 2026, mostly still done by hand. A crew pulls cable on Tuesday. Someone writes down how much. Someone else, days or weeks later, turns that number into an invoice. Somewhere in between, a utility locate ticket expires, a subcontractor's insurance certificate lapses, a reel of fiber goes missing, and the whole thing slows down. This is not a dramatic failure. It is a thousand small frictions, and the friction is where the margin goes.

Clad, a New York company founded in 2022 and shipped through Y Combinator's Winter 2023 batch, sells software that tries to remove that friction. Its pitch is short enough to fit on a fiber reel: project management and billing software, purpose-built for infrastructure. The longer version is that Clad takes the two things construction companies care about most - the work and the money - and puts them in the same system, so that what happens in the field becomes what shows up on the invoice without a human retyping it in the middle.

The founder went from Instagram to 811 tickets, on purpose

Clad's founder and CEO, Jason Rudin, arrived at construction billing by a route that looks, on paper, like a series of increasingly strange decisions. He was a business analyst at McKinsey, then went to Google, then spent years as a product manager at Instagram - which is roughly the opposite of a trench. Somewhere in there he decided that the interesting problem was not the next social feed but the deeply un-photogenic work of getting a fiber contractor paid on time. This is either a mid-career crisis or exactly the right instinct, and the market for infrastructure software suggests it is the latter.

The timing helps. There is, right now, an enormous amount of money and political will aimed at rebuilding the physical internet and the electrical grid - fiber to rural counties, power lines for new load, the general project of dragging the country's connectivity into the present. The utilities, internet providers, and contractors doing that work are under real pressure to move fast. And they are, for the most part, running the operation on QuickBooks and Excel and a group text. Clad's wager is that an industry this large and this analog is not a backwater - it is an opening.

What the software actually does

Clad is really five tools that share a spine. There is project management - field data collection, production tracking, blueprint markups tied to actual quantities, forecasting across a portfolio of jobs. There is financial management, which is the part that makes the founder's fintech instincts show: invoices generated automatically from production data, retainage tracked (retainage being the money a client holds back until a job is done, and a perennial source of contractor heartburn), and synchronization with the ERP systems accountants already live in.

Then there are the three tools that reveal how closely Clad has studied the actual job site. Vendor Management handles onboarding, ongoing compliance, and bidding for the subcontractors who do much of the physical work. Materials Management tracks inventory down to the warehouse and the individual project - including, yes, fiber reels. And Clad Locates is an AI-assisted tool that files and tracks 811 utility locate tickets, the permits you need before anyone puts a shovel in the ground.

That last one is worth pausing on, because it is the kind of feature you only build if you have watched the problem happen. A single expired or missing 811 locate can freeze a crew for days - people standing around a trench they are legally not allowed to dig. Automating that ticket is not glamorous. It is the software equivalent of a small, well-placed bolt. It also happens to be exactly the sort of thing customers remember.

Who is actually using it

Clad names its customers, which is more than a lot of early-stage software companies are willing to do. The list reads like a directory of the people quietly building the physical internet: Underline, SummitIG, United Fiber, Intrepid, RLM, Velox, Public Safety Towers, Roadlink, and the Sellenriek Family of Companies. These are regional ISPs, prime contractors, and subcontractors - the layer of the economy that shows up as a road closure and a spool of orange cable, and almost never as a headline.

The business model is the familiar one: B2B SaaS, sold to operators and the contractors in their orbit, monetizing the workflows above. Clad has raised at the seed stage - reported totals hover around a few hundred thousand dollars, with Y Combinator and the fintech-focused fund Better Tomorrow Ventures among the backers. It is a small team, roughly a dozen people, working out of New York while their customers dig across multiple states. None of this is a company that has already won. It is a company that has found a real problem and is pointing a small, sharp team directly at it.

The bet, stated plainly

The optimistic case for Clad is not that it will out-flash anyone. It is that construction remains one of the least digitized large industries in the economy, that the money flowing into infrastructure is enormous and durable, and that the company closest to the actual pain - the expired locate, the held-back retainage, the invoice nobody had time to send - has a real shot at becoming the system of record for the whole job. The pessimistic case is the one every vertical SaaS company faces: incumbents like Procore, the gravitational pull of the spreadsheet, and the difficulty of selling software to people who are, understandably, busy standing in a trench.

Clad's answer to all of that is to be specific. Not construction software in general - infrastructure. Not project management or billing - both, in one place, because the entire point is the connection between them. It is a narrow bet, and narrowness, in software, is usually the thing that works. The crews rebuilding the internet have to get paid somehow. Clad would like to be the reason it happens on time.