Cameron Harris: Building a Better Construction Finance Industry
Investing in America, and the construction industry that builds it, has faced its fair share of hurdles. From unpredictable pricing to banks and credit unions tightening their lending, builders and developers have struggled to find the financing to keep projects moving to supply the homes people need in their growing communities.
And the work outpacing the money impacts more than just the project—it’s roofers, plumbers, painters, sheetrockers, and other subcontractors either waiting on a project that never breaks ground, or working one that has, and still waiting on the timely paychecks they need to cover the mortgages on their own homes. For Cameron Harris, it was a problem he saw an opportunity to fix, and that’s why he co-founded CoFi.
Cameron knew firsthand how a lack of construction financing and slow payouts impacted workers. His grandfather ran a plumbing business, his father worked in commercial construction, and his parents took on fix-and-flip projects of their own. Cameron grew up around job sites and permits and the kind of subcontractor conversations most people never hear, and that background is why he chose to study Construction Management at Brigham Young University. After graduating, he continued to pursue construction, taking his first job as a project engineer at Lusardi Construction Company before moving into real estate investment and development, where he began sourcing and closing his own projects.
That’s when the industry’s shortcomings first became apparent. Slow payments and disconnected paperwork became Cameron’s own cash flow problem, week after week and project after project, as he waited on banks to release draws while subcontractors waited on him. He’d grown up around the trade, but now he was the person responsible for getting a project built, and he knew something had to be done.
That frustration eventually led him to a business partner, Mike Lacey, who was fighting a version of the same problem from the builder’s side. Together they decided the industry didn’t need another workaround. It needed different infrastructure, the kind that moves money to a job site faster, keeps contractors paid on schedule, and gives builders the capital to keep growing. “I spent years on the other side of this, waiting on money that should’ve already been there while subcontractors waited on me,” Cameron says. “We needed the system to move faster.” The results that infrastructure was built to produce are concrete—more builders getting access to funding, more contractors getting paid on time, more communities growing on schedule, and more Americans moving into homes that actually get finished.
Building eDraw, Becoming CoFi
Understanding the problem firsthand didn’t automatically come with the skills needed to build a company that could fix it at scale. Cameron got those through Stanford’s StartX accelerator and Dreamit Ventures’ Urbantech program, both of which he went through in 2019 and 2020 as CoFi took shape. He built his fintech education the same way he’d built his construction knowledge—by doing the work and learning what he needed as the company grew.
The company Cameron and Mike started working on around 2016 and 2017 was formally incorporated as eDraw, Inc. in June 2018. The name changed more than once in the years that followed, but the mission stayed fixed on the same target Cameron had lived with as a real estate developer. Get money to the job site faster, with less friction between everyone involved.
The first version of the product did one thing well—it digitized the construction draw process. Invoices, budget checks, lien waivers, and payment requests moved into software instead of getting passed around as paper. It was a real improvement, but it still relied on someone physically visiting a job site to confirm work was done before releasing funds. That limitation mattered more than it seemed, because it capped how fast the company could actually move money, which was the entire point.
COVID forced the issue. With in-person inspections suddenly a liability, Cameron’s team found that geo-located, time-stamped 3D camera images could do the same job remotely. Contractors, owners, and banks could verify progress without anyone leaving their desk. Payment delays that averaged 40 to 70 days industry-wide dropped to under five. It was the kind of fix that came from understanding exactly where the bottleneck delayed projects.
That success surfaced a harder problem. As CoFi worked more closely with traditional lenders, Cameron and his team saw that some builders simply didn’t fit the credit boxes those lenders were willing to work within. The projects were sound. The paperwork just didn’t match how the underwriting models were built. So Cameron pushed CoFi into a bigger role than software vendor. The company became a lender itself, a much riskier bet than shipping another feature.
The Capital Behind the Company
Becoming a direct lender meant CoFi needed its own capital, and that meant taking on back-leverage debt to fund the loans it originated, with the company contributing a share of each one. That requirement slowed early growth, and solving it fell squarely into the part of the business Cameron leads personally—capital partner strategy.
CoFi brought in Tenacity Ventures to source the back-leverage debt it needed, and Westerly Winds, adding to CoFi’s lending capabilities. Both joined the company’s 2022 seed round alongside Blackhorn Ventures and MetaProp, a $7 million raise that let CoFi scale its lending business without walking away from the software that got it there. Tenacity’s Ben Narasin, an investor in that round, said at the time that CoFi’s position between construction and fintech gave it real growth potential, and called it the only company he’d seen combining a lending marketplace with industry-specific SaaS payment software.
The lending model itself reflected Cameron’s construction-first instincts more than a typical fintech playbook. Mike Lacey described the early version as a “personalized concierge” service, connecting builders to a hand-picked network of lenders and working as the borrower’s advocate through underwriting instead of running it like a matchmaking algorithm. Approval rates hovered around 25 percent in those early days. Roughly 80 percent of approved borrowers came back for their next project. That return rate matters more than the approval number. It suggests builders who made it through CoFi’s door didn’t want to go anywhere else.
Two Businesses, One Mission
Today CoFi runs two complementary businesses, both shaped by the same problem Cameron set out to solve as a developer. CoFi Lending provides direct construction financing to builders and developers, including projects traditional lenders pass on, with the oversight to keep them on time and on budget. CoFi Blueprint takes the same approach to financial institutions, giving banks and credit unions a fully managed platform combining funds control, risk assessment, inspections, and software so they can grow their construction lending without adding headcount.
The results show up in specific numbers, not just growth charts. When Bank of Idaho moved its construction loan portfolio onto CoFi Blueprint, the two companies completed the transition in two months, migrating active projects mid-flight. That portfolio now runs on average 120 draws a month, with processing times around two days and one bank employee handling what used to take a larger team.
Outside recognition has followed the growth. CoFi placed No. 359 on the 2024 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America and No. 11 on MountainWest Capital Network’s 2024 Utah 100 list. BUILD Magazine also gave CoFi the Best Construction Finance Platform of 2026. And, Will Reed of Top 100 named CoFi an employer of choice out of more than 500 companies that had raised seed or Series A funding, citing its mission, culture, and growth trajectory.
How Cameron Leads
Cameron’s title has stayed CEO and co-founder through every version of the company, but what that title covers has grown considerably. He focuses on long-term vision, capital partner strategy, and innovation, while staying closely connected to product development, underwriting, and risk management—the parts of the business closest to his own background as a builder and developer.
Cameron has said publicly that the real risk in a construction loan isn’t the underwriting decision made at closing. It’s what happens to the project’s visibility and oversight afterward, once a lender’s attention naturally moves on to the next deal. That view shapes almost everything CoFi builds, because a platform that only helps close a loan faster solves half the problem Cameron actually lived through as a developer. The harder half is staying on top of a project for the months it takes to finish. It’s also the gap CoFi points to when explaining the case for its own platform to banks. FDIC data the company cites suggests a construction lending team can manage roughly 60 loans manually, compared with 130 to 190 on CoFi Blueprint, a gap that traces back to the same visibility problem Cameron has been describing since his own days as a developer.
That same instinct shows up in how Cameron talks about judgment versus process. He has said the best solutions in construction finance come from firsthand understanding of how risk, financing, and project execution actually unfold on a job site. Spreadsheets can model a project. They can’t replicate the judgment that comes from having stood on one. It’s a large part of why Cameron has kept CoFi’s underwriting and risk functions close to people with real construction experience. He treats those functions as more than a numbers exercise.
Cameron has built six values into CoFi’s culture, and the company’s own history offers a concrete example of each. Humble means staying open to feedback instead of assuming the company already has the answers, which tracks with how CoFi kept refining its inspection technology well past its first working version instead of declaring an early win. Hungry means never settling for what already works, the same instinct that pushed the company from software into direct lending even though it was the harder path. Smart means exercising careful judgment, since mistakes in construction finance carry real financial weight, and the back-leverage debt structure CoFi put in place before scaling its lending business is a case in point. Loyal means treating every customer relationship like a partnership, the same standard behind the “personalized concierge” model. Honest means earning trust through consistent follow-through, including being upfront with builders about approval odds instead of overselling them. Fast is the value with the clearest evidence behind it, enabling some of the most efficient draw approval times in the industry.
Cameron has described his leadership philosophy in simple terms—put the best people in the places where they can have the most impact, then give them the trust and support to do the job. “My job isn’t to have every answer,” he says. “It’s to put the right people in the right seats and then get out of their way.” That philosophy shows up directly in how CoFi is structured. Day-to-day execution across credit, sales, marketing, and operations runs through people Cameron has put in place and largely stayed out of the way of, which frees him to focus on where the company is headed instead of getting pulled into every operational decision. It’s a division of labor that mirrors a lesson Cameron learned as a developer. Knowing which problem is actually yours to solve, and trusting someone else with the rest, is half the job.
What’s Next
Cameron believes the next five years of construction finance will be shaped by connected data, intelligent automation, and real-time decision-making. He’s just as clear that none of it replaces the judgment of people who’ve actually built things. CoFi is investing in predictive risk intelligence and AI-assisted underwriting, but Cameron treats those tools as support for decisions that still need a person behind them, the same balance he’s tried to strike since the company’s first pivot away from manual inspections.
The long-term goal Cameron has described goes beyond either CoFi Lending or CoFi Blueprint individually. He wants lenders, builders, inspectors, servicing teams, and capital providers operating on one connected platform. That’s a sharp departure from the patchwork of emails, phone calls, and disconnected software that defined his own years as a developer. It’s an ambitious version of the fix he was trying to make happen for himself back when he was still waiting on banks to release his own draws.
At a time when affordable housing remains one of the country’s biggest challenges, Cameron sees construction finance as one of the practical levers for addressing it. Fewer stalled draws. Fewer projects that die in paperwork before they’re ever built. More builders who get funded on the strength of their work instead of how well their paperwork happens to fit a lender’s template. That’s the industry Cameron set out to build when he was still waiting on his own draws to clear. He’s still building it.
