The general contractor who learned to code, sold a security company to LogMeIn, then went back to the job site to fix how construction gets paid.
Two hard hats: one for code, one for concrete.
Walk onto a job site and you will find a supplier who delivered ten pallets of lumber and is now waiting ninety days to see a dollar of it. The contractor is waiting too. So is the distributor upstream. Money moves through construction the way water moves through cracked pipe: slowly, and with a lot lost on the way. Yaser Masoudnia spent over a decade inside that system as a licensed general contractor before he decided to re-plumb it.
BlueTape, the company he co-founded and runs as CEO, is a fintech platform aimed squarely at the unglamorous middle of the building economy. It hands suppliers, contractors and distributors the tools that large enterprises take for granted: net 30/60/90 terms, automated invoicing, accounts receivable management, credit decisioning, and access to working capital. The company has raised in the neighborhood of $59 million to do it.
What makes the pitch land is not the software. Plenty of people can write a credit-decisioning engine. Far fewer have also stood on a half-built luxury home in Northern Virginia, signed off on a subcontractor, and felt the squeeze of a late payment in their own pocket. Masoudnia has done both. He treats that overlap not as a resume footnote but as the entire thesis of the business.
The keywords that orbit BlueTape read like the worry list of every small builder in America: invoice financing, accounts receivable, net terms, credit limits, cash flow management, factoring, early payment programs, automated collections. Masoudnia's wager is that the trade can keep all of that under one roof instead of stitching it together from spreadsheets, phone calls and a bank that does not understand the rhythm of a build.
Long before he was talking about net terms and factoring, Masoudnia was making the case that the password should disappear. In 2015 he co-founded NoPassword, originally called WiActs, with a blunt mission: improve cyber-security and user privacy by delivering the most secure and private authentication on the market.
It was identity and access management built for the businesses that could least afford a breach and least afford an IT department - small and mid-sized companies running on a skeleton crew. That focus on the underserved end of the market would become a pattern. NoPassword worked. LogMeIn acquired it, and Masoudnia stepped inside the larger company to run product, taking the helm of the LastPass offering team as a senior director of product management.
Running a password manager used by millions taught him something about trust at scale: people hand you the keys to their entire digital life, and they only do it if the experience is clean and the promises are kept. He carries that same vocabulary into fintech. Transparency, ethical practice and open communication are not slogans he reaches for in interviews by accident - they are the residue of years spent guarding other people's credentials.
Then he walked away from security entirely. Not because it had failed, but because a different, messier problem kept tugging at him from the world he came up in. The trade he had grown up around could not get paid on time, and no amount of two-factor authentication was going to fix that.
Software founders rarely hold a contractor's license. Builders rarely ship a SaaS product. The strange specificity of Masoudnia's career is that he refused to choose.
At 13, in Iran, he built two games on a Commodore 64. In high school he wrote software to help students choose colleges and majors. He turned that instinct into NoPassword, a passwordless identity startup he sold to LogMeIn, then ran the LastPass product offering team as a senior director of product management.
He comes from a family with more than 40 years in construction and real estate development. He earned his own general contractor's license in the DC metro area and California, and built luxury properties in Northern Virginia and Northern California. He has been the small business owner waiting on a check.
Before BlueTape, he was pitching a world without passwords. See him make the case:
Password-free authentication with NoPassword's Yaser Masoudnia →Construction runs on a payment culture older than software: do the work now, invoice later, wait. A supplier ships materials on trust. A contractor bills the job and waits on a draw. Net 30 stretches to net 60, net 60 to net 90, and somewhere in that gap a perfectly healthy business runs out of cash for payroll. Banks, built for predictable salaried borrowers, tend to look at a seasonal contractor and see only risk.
Masoudnia met that problem from the inside. He had partnered with suppliers, distributors and subcontractors, and watched payment delays, thin credit access and supply chain shocks hold good companies back. The frustration was not abstract. It was the specific, recurring sting of having done the work and not yet holding the money.
BlueTape's answer is to compress that lag. Offer net 30/60/90 terms backed by the platform rather than the supplier's balance sheet. Automate the invoicing and the chasing. Run credit checks and decisioning in the background so a buyer can be approved online instead of through a week of faxed paperwork. Let suppliers get paid early while buyers keep their flexibility.
To build the financial muscle for that, Masoudnia brought on Patrick Gannon, a fintech operator with stops at Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Visa, plus work on the investor side of Lending Club and digital lending at Uplift. The division of labor is clean: one founder knows the job site, the other knows the capital markets. Between them they are trying to make trade credit feel less like a favor and more like infrastructure.
Masoudnia traces his drive to watching his parents run a small business, and to growing up somewhere that taught him to expect the worst case and solve for it anyway. He aims BlueTape at a specific crowd: small family businesses, minority- and women-owned shops, and companies started by immigrants - the part of construction that has always been the last to get credit and the first to get squeezed.
His leadership style follows from that. He talks about distributing authority instead of micromanaging, building teams that bridge construction, finance, technology and operations, and keeping communication open enough that people can speak up without consequence. He is candid about failure too, treating it as something to move through quickly rather than avoid. Embracing failure and learning fast from mistakes is, by his own account, one of the things he is best at - which is a strange and useful skill in an industry where one bad bet on credit can sink a small supplier.
He resists the idea of a single tidy origin story. There was no lightning-bolt moment, he says, just a slow accumulation: watching his parents run a small business, reflecting on the systemic gaps in construction - limited working capital, poor payment management, slow technology adoption - and noticing that his own two careers happened to slot together into a key for that lock. The company that resulted is built, deliberately, around customer needs rather than company prestige. The goal is software people actually reach for during a workday, not a trophy on a pitch deck.