About
Built by people who've lived the residential construction payment problem from inside the industry.
Builders carry the cashflow risk of every job they take on, financing materials and trades out of personal funds before progress payments arrive. Subcontractors wait weeks or months to get paid, often by builders who would pay them sooner if they could. Owners hand over deposits and progress payments without knowing where the money goes after it leaves their account. Every party in the chain is exposed to the failure of the parties around them, and the failures happen often enough that the news cycle has lost the ability to be surprised by them.
We built BuildFair to change how the money moves, so the rest of the industry can get on with the work it's good at.
What we do
Owner funds are held in regulated escrow with our banking partner Kobble. Funds release on verified progress, and subcontractors are paid through the same flow. The builder stops being the small bank between the owner and the subcontractor. Everyone gets paid from money that's already there, externally held, with a complete audit trail of where every dollar went.
The mechanics are explained in detail on our Trust & Security page. The short version: we don't hold customer funds. We hold the rules, the records, and the audit trail. The regulated party holds the money.
Why residential
The same payment problem exists in commercial construction, and several companies are working on it there. Residential is different. The contracts are smaller and more variable. The buyers are individual homeowners rather than institutional clients with their own quantity surveyors and procurement processes. The builders are mostly small and medium-sized businesses, often family-run, with thin margins and exposure to a single bad job that can take down years of work. The trades are mostly small businesses or sole operators, last in line and least protected when something goes wrong.
Australian residential construction is a sector that touches almost every household at some point and produces failures at a rate the country has accepted as normal. We don't think it should be normal. We don't think the people inside it should keep absorbing the cost of a payment system that wasn't designed for the scale residential construction has reached.
We built BuildFair for residential specifically. The product reflects how the sector actually works rather than being a commercial-construction tool retrofitted for smaller projects.
What we believe
Most builders aren't dishonest. Most subcontractors aren't unreasonable. Most owners aren't naive. The payment system has been quietly failing all of them for decades, and the failures get individualised when they should be systemic. We treat the system as the thing to fix, not the people inside it.
Right now, they often are. Owner deposits get pooled into the same operating account that's covering last month's invoices and this month's overheads, so by the time the next stage starts the money for it is already spent. One slow progress payment or one disputed variation and a perfectly solvent builder is suddenly carrying the job on their own working capital. That's a structural failure, not a builder failure. Funds for a project should sit ready for that project, not float across whichever job needs cash this week.
Subcontractors do the work, carry the cashflow risk, and wait. Payment terms across Australian residential construction routinely stretch weeks or months past when the work was actually done, and 'whenever the next progress claim clears' is treated as a normal answer. We think payment should follow verified work without delay, out of funds that are already ringfenced for the project.
Handing over a deposit and a progress payment shouldn't require trust in a stranger's commercial discipline. Owners should be able to see, in real time, where their money sits, when it gets released, and who it gets paid to.
Not papered over with insurance products that pay out after a builder has already failed, or with reform proposals that get diluted on their way through state parliaments. Fixed structurally, by changing how the money moves.
The team
Founder, CEO
Richard has worked in Australian residential construction for over 30 years, primarily as a plasterer, across hundreds of jobs. He has watched the payment system change, fail, and fail again. He chairs the BuildFair board and informs every product decision.
Founder, CTO
Jackson founded BuildFair after watching the construction payment system fail builders, subcontractors, and homeowners over many years. He leads engineering, product strategy, and operations.
Product Manager
Mark is a builder with more than 20 years of experience in Australian residential construction. He owns BuildFair's product roadmap and translates between the realities of life on a building site and the engineering decisions the platform requires. Mark joined BuildFair because he had spent two decades watching the payment problem from the inside and wanted to be part of fixing it.
General Counsel
Paul leads BuildFair's legal and regulatory function, including the company's compliance posture, the regulatory framework around the platform's operations, and the structuring of customer relationships. He provides the independent legal oversight a fintech of BuildFair's kind requires.
Head of Go-to-Market
Zoltan leads BuildFair's commercial function, including the founding-100 builder programme, supplier and developer partnerships, and the company's expansion across Australia. He brings ten years of hands-on carpentry experience to the role, so the conversations he has with builders aren't theoretical, he's worked the sites the platform is built for. His background also includes foreign exchange sales, where he spent years building and managing relationships with Australian businesses navigating regulated payments, the same shape of relationship BuildFair builds with its customers.
What we built
BuildFair is payment infrastructure for Australian residential construction. At its core is a double-entry ledger with a hash-chained, tamper-evident audit trail, regulated payments handled by our banking partner Kobble, and identity verification through Sumsub. Project funds are held externally and release on verified progress, so owners, builders, subcontractors, and suppliers are all paid from money that is already there.
It is designed around how Australian residential construction actually operates, the way progress claims, retentions, and subcontractor payments really move on a site, rather than how a fintech team might assume they work.
If you build, own, or work on Australian residential construction sites, BuildFair is for you. We'd like to talk.
