Construction Capital Is Broken. We Rebuilt the Rail.

Construction is the largest asset class in the world. Ten trillion dollars of work is put in place every year. Every highway, every hospital, every data center, every apartment building that will house the next generation. All of it runs on a money system that was designed for paper mail, carbon copies, and a fax machine.

The average draw takes fourteen days to clear. The average subcontractor waits fifty-two days to get paid. Every general contractor in America is, whether they admit it or not, a short-term lender to their own projects. Every owner is underwriting a system they cannot audit. Every lender is funding against summaries they cannot verify. And every sub is financing the job with a line of credit, a home equity loan, or a personal guarantee.

This is not a software problem. It is an infrastructure problem.

When equities needed a way to clear, the industry did not build a better spreadsheet. It built the DTCC. When derivatives needed a way to settle, nobody shipped a prettier PDF. They built LCH. Clearinghouses exist because certain markets are too important, too expensive, and too fragile to run on trust and faxes. Construction capital is one of those markets. It has simply never had a rail of its own.

So we built one.

We call it the Construction Clearinghouse. It is a shared ledger that sits underneath every project and connects every party that touches the money. The GC sees the pay app. The sub sees the waiver. The owner sees the draw. The lender sees the evidence. The surety sees the compliance record. Nobody re-keys a form. Nobody waits on a PDF. Nothing moves without signed proof that it should.

This is what a rail does. It removes the friction that everyone had just agreed to live with. It turns a 52-day cash cycle into a 9-day cash cycle. It turns a 14-day lender review into a 2-day release. It turns a stack of 230 PDFs into one auditable record that every counterparty can sign against.

We are not building a better PMIS. We are not building a better payment processor. We are not building a better compliance tool. We are building the financial infrastructure layer that the industry was supposed to have twenty years ago and never got.

This work is not neutral. It has an enemy. The enemy is not Procore, Sage, or QuickBooks. Those are good tools. The enemy is the 52-day cash cycle and the quiet industry consensus that it is somehow acceptable. It is not. It kills small subs. It strangles growing GCs. It rewards the biggest players for sitting on other people’s money. It is a tax paid by builders, to builders, in exchange for nothing.

We refuse to accept it. We think you should refuse to accept it too.

If you run finance at a GC and your line of credit is the only thing keeping payroll whole on the 15th: this rail is for you.

If you are an owner or a developer and you have ever funded a draw you could not verify, hoping the chain of waivers was actually signed: this rail is for you.

If you are a lender and the last construction default in your book surprised you instead of surprising your credit committee: this rail is for you.

If you are a sub and you have paid a factor, taken a second mortgage, or watched a good job kill your business because the money came too late: this rail is for you.

The rail is already live. There are already builders routing real capital through it. There is already an Alliance forming around it (a hundred CFOs, lenders, and owners who have decided the 52-day cycle is no longer their problem to absorb).

You can keep arguing with your PMIS. You can keep sending draw packages by email. You can keep writing off float as the cost of doing business. Or you can put your projects on the rail, see what a 9-day cash cycle feels like, and never go back.

We are not asking you to believe us. We are asking you to run one project through it and measure the result. If the cash cycle does not compress, we work for free until it does, and we wire you twenty-five thousand dollars for the inconvenience. That is how sure we are.

Construction capital is broken. We rebuilt the rail. Come build on it.

Javier Sanz Alvarez
Founder, Subcontractor Audit
(Ex-CEO, European digital brokerage. Scaled zero to five million users. Acquired by a tier-one US investment bank.)