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- 🤯 Osome Turnaround Story: How It Almost Ran Out of Cash
🤯 Osome Turnaround Story: How It Almost Ran Out of Cash
Osome burned over $1M a month, nearly hit zero months runway, then rebuilt the business to reach S$26.6M revenue and move closer to profitability.
Admond Lee
May 31, 2026
Hey Founders,
👋🏻 Welcome to The Runway Ventures (🎙️Podcast Edition) — where I interview founders and deep dive into their stories to help you become the top 1% founder by learning from their startup journey and mistakes with actionable insights.
Today’s story is a little different.
I invited Osome’s CEO (Eugenio Ferrante) and VP of Strategy (Egor Fetisov), to share how Osome went from rocket-ship growth to almost zero months runway (yes, Osome almost died) — and how they rebuilt the business into one of the most inspiring turnaround stories I’ve heard 🤯
This is the first time Osome’s management is sharing this publicly about their crazy journey. Let’s get to it! 🚀
Today at a Glance:
🫡 1 Company → Osome
⚠️ 2 Mistakes → Chasing growth at all costs
🧠 3 Lessons Learned → Profitability > Growth at all costs
🔗 The Runway Insights → How to build an AI-Native startup
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar → Konvy raises $22M (Series B) to expand Thai omnichannel beauty platform across Southeast Asia and grow private label portfolio
🫡 1 Company: Osome
🌟 The Highlights
🇸🇬 Founded by Victor Lysenko in 2017 after experiencing the pain of startup admin himself, Osome helps founders and SMEs start and run their companies without drowning in paperwork, accounting, tax, and compliance.
The Problem — 🥲 Founders think company admin is “just paperwork” — until it quietly eats their time, delays filings, messes up their books, creates compliance risk, and pulls them away from the actual work of growing the business.
The Solution — 💪🏻 Osome built an AI Company Management Platform that provides a service-as-a-software for founders and SMEs, handling the boring-but-critical company admin through a mix of automation and human experts — so founders can focus on building, selling, and growing the business.
🧑🏻💼 Company setup + corp sec → get incorporated and stay compliant without figuring out the paperwork yourself.
📘 Accounting + bookkeeping → keep your books clean without spending founder hours chasing receipts and reconciling transactions.
📝 Tax + compliance support → avoid missed deadlines, messy filings, and expensive mistakes.
 | And it worked! The market said yes pretty quickly. 🇭🇰🇬🇧 By 2019, Osome had already attracted 2,300+ customers and was testing expansion into Hong Kong and the UK. Then the company really started scaling. |
🏔️ At its peak, Osome:
grew from 2,300+ customers in 2019 to 11,000+ businesses by 2022
raised $16M (Series A) in 2021, then $25M (Series B) in 2022
2x its revenue since Series A (by the time of its Series B)
expanded from Singapore into Hong Kong and the UK
built its own accounting platform and “Accounting Factory” model, combining automation, machine learning, and human accountants
became one of only four Xero Platinum Partners in Singapore and won Xero Singapore Partner of the Year
🌋 The Lowlights
By the end of 2023, we were nearing a situation where we had almost zero months runway.
But behind the fast growth, Osome was actually struggling internally.
📈 After raising capital around 2022, Osome doubled down on expansion, R&D, operations, and customer acquisition. The bet was simple → keep growing, then raise the next big round later.
Then 2023 hit.
📉 The fundraising market froze. Investors stopped rewarding pure top-line growth and started asking the harder question: “Can this business grow efficiently?” That was the painful shift. Osome was still operating with a growth-at-all-costs mindset, but the market had moved on.
🤯💸 By the end of 2023, Osome was close to running out of cash with zero months of runway. There was even a period where the leadership team didn’t receive salary for 3 months.
The company had to raise an internal down round from existing shareholders just to buy enough time to survive and execute the turnaround.
🙏🏻 Cost cutting. Layoffs. But because Osome wasn’t a pure software company — it was software plus service — cutting too fast created another problem: customer experience suffered.
NPS plummeted in 2024 due to negative reviews from customers
delays with filings, missed filing deadlines, and communication issues
That matters because Osome wasn’t selling a nice-to-have tool. It was selling trust.
🚀 The Comeback
After almost running out of runway, the team had to stop chasing growth at all costs and rebuild the company with more discipline. It was the boring, painful operator work that most founders don’t post about.
🏄🏻♂️ The turnaround came down to 4 moves:
✂️ Cut the burn — Osome went through near zero-based budgeting, trimmed R&D, reduced headcount, tightened sales and marketing spend, and became much more careful with cash.
🧑🏻💼 Focus on customer segments — instead of trying to serve every SME, Osome doubled down on stronger-fit customers like tech startups and freelancers.
💟 Rebuild trust — after service quality suffered, the team made customer pain impossible to ignore. Reviews were pushed into Slack, NPS was tracked closely, and management personally called unhappy customers to understand what broke.
🤖 Use AI properly — Osome automated routine work like categorisation and data entry, but kept human experts involved for filings, advisory, regulators, and high-stakes edge cases where mistakes are expensive.
Guess what?
Osome later reported 25%+ YoY revenue growth, 60% improvement in annualised EBITDA, 35% improvement in CAC within 6 months, and NPS nearly 3x quarter-on-quarter.
📈📈 By May 2026, audited FY2025 results showed S$26.6M revenue, 50% EBITDA improvement, and a 62% jump in operating cash flow.
📌 Here’s the TLDR of Osome:
May 2017 — Victor Lysenko started Osome in Singapore.
Dec 2018 — 💰 Raised $2 million (Seed) led by Target Global, according to contemporaneous reporting and later company materials.
Nov 2020 — 💰 Raised $3 million from XA Network and AltaIR Capital.
Jun 2021 — 💰 Raised $16 million (Series A) to expand its AI-based accounting platform globally.
Dec 2022 — 💰 Raised $25 million (Series B) to become profitable.
2023 — 🩸 The company kept spending into growth, R&D, operations, and paid acquisition, but the fundraising market froze and the business was slow to adapt.
Almost ran out of cash by end of 2023.
Had to raise an internal down round from existing shareholders to survive.
2024
Feb — 😾 Customer complained about missed filings, communication issues, and penalties after staff exits and layoffs.
May — 💰 Secured $17 million (Series B extension).
Sep — Eugenio Ferrante was brought in for advisory/turnaround work.
Dec — The turnaround measured worked! The company reported 25% revenue growth, a 60% improvement in annualised EBITDA, and sharply lower CAC.
2025
Jan — 🥳 NPS started trending up again.
Nov — NPS had nearly 3x quarter on quarter and CAC had improved 35%.
Nov — 🚶🏻♂️ Victor Lysenko stepped down after more than 8 years leading the company.
Jan 2026 — Eugenio was formally named CEO.
May 2026 — 🔥 Audited FY2025 results showed S$26.6 million in revenue, a 50% improvement in EBITDA, and a 62% jump in operating cash flow, serving over 40,000 founders.
🤯 Honestly, this is probably one of the most inspiring turnaround stories I’ve heard.
Osome’s original vision was to build what AI can accelerate today. But it was early back then. The costs were real, and the full productivity gains hadn’t arrived yet.
That’s why it went from rocket-ship growth to almost zero runway, layoffs, unhappy customers, and a real trust problem.
But instead of pretending everything was fine, the team cut burn, refocused the business, rebuilt customer trust, improved the economics and is now on a clear path to profitability.
How?
🤖🤝🏻 The recent acceleration of AI allowed Osome to capitalise on years of subject matter expertise and know-how to reliably automate workflows from manual tasks, while keeping human experts focused on quality, filings, advisory, regulators, and high-stakes edge cases.
Want to learn more about Osome?
⚠️ 2 Mistakes
Mistake 1: Chasing growth at all costs
We basically spent too much money and we put too much money in some channels that were not very efficient in terms of return on investment.
After raising money, Osome doubled down on growth — R&D, automation, operations, sales, marketing, and customer acquisition.
⚠️ They poured money into acquisition channels like Google and Facebook, even when the returns were getting weaker.
🚨 By the end of 2023, Osome was burning more than $1M per month and was close to zero months runway. That’s where “growth” becomes dangerous.
Mistake 2: Reacted too late to the market shift
☀️ Before the market shifted (easy money), this was the playbook:
Raised money → Spent more → Hired more → Grew more → Raised money again
🥶 After the market shifted (funding winter hit in 2023):
Suddenly, investors were no longer asking, “How fast are you growing?” They were asking, “Can you grow without burning so much cash?”
🙅🏻♂️ But Osome was still investing heavily in R&D and expecting to raise again. The future round didn’t come. Investors looked at the burn, the efficiency, and the bottom line — and passed.
🛟 By the time Osome fully accepted the market had shifted, it had less room to manoeuvre. The company had to go through painful cost cuts, layoffs, near zero-based budgeting, and an internal down round from existing shareholders just to buy time for the turnaround.
🧠 3 Lessons Learned
Lesson 1: Profitability > Growth at all costs
Growth gives you headlines, but profitability gives you options.
The last thing you want to do as a founder is to grow like the next round is guaranteed.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
If every new customer makes your burn worse, you’re not scaling. You’re digging faster.
Fundraising should accelerate the business, not become the thing keeping it alive.
The best time to fix unit economics is when you still have cash, not when you’re already near zero runway.
🛠️ Operator Playbook:
🧮 Track profitable growth, not just revenue growth
Every month, break growth into 3 buckets:
Good growth → customers with healthy gross margin, strong retention, low support load, clear CAC payback.
Okay growth → customers that may become profitable later but need monitoring.
Bad growth → customers who are expensive to acquire, expensive to serve, low retention, or poor-fit.
🤑 Build a no-fundraise plan before you need it
Assume you can’t raise for 18 months. What would you stop today?
That answer is usually where the truth is.
Lesson 2: Move before the market forces you
In 2023, the market changed from “grow at all costs” to “grow efficiently or die”. Osome reacted too late, and by the time they adjusted, they had to cut harder, raise an internal down round, and survive with almost no room for error.
Keep watching the game you’re playing because it can change overnight.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
Founder speed is not just about shipping product. It’s also about reacting fast when reality changes.
If your plan depends on fundraising, you need a backup plan before the round fails.
🛠️ Operator Playbook:
🫣 Be paranoid
Don’t wait until the bank account screams at you.
If fundraising slows, CAC creeps up, or investors start asking different questions, assume the game has changed.
🙏🏻 Protect the core before cutting the burn
For Osome, the core was trust and service quality.
Cutting ops too abruptly hurts customer experience. So don’t just ask, “What can we cut?” Ask, “What can we cut without damaging the things customers actually pay us for?”
Lesson 3: Trust is the product
Osome was handling accounting, tax, compliance, corporate secretary work, and filings — the boring stuff founders don’t want to think about, but also the stuff that can seriously screw them if it goes wrong.
So when Osome had to cut costs abruptly, the pain didn’t just stay inside the company. Customers felt it. Service quality dropped. NPS plummeted. There were complaints around missed filings, communication issues, and penalties.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
If customers trust you with high-stakes work, small mistakes feel big.
In software-plus-service businesses, humans are not just “cost.” They are often part of the customer experience.
The fastest way to destroy trust is to make customers feel ignored when something important is breaking.
🛠️ Operator Playbook:
🧐 Know what customers are really buying
For Osome, customers weren’t just buying accounting software.
They were buying peace of mind: “Please don’t let me miss filings, mess up tax, or get into compliance trouble.”
Every founder should ask: “What fear are customers paying us to remove?”
🤝🏻 Make customer pain impossible to ignore
Osome later pushed Google reviews into Slack, tracked NPS closely, and had management call unhappy customers.
That’s the move. Don’t hide complaints inside a support inbox. Put them where leadership can see them.
🔗 The Runway Insights
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar
Konvy raises $22M (Series B) to expand Thai omnichannel beauty platform across Southeast Asia and grow private label portfolio (More)
First Circle secures $4.87M (debt facility) through sustainability-linked credit line to expand working capital lending to Philippine SMEs (More)
K25.ai bags $2M (Pre-Series A) to scale AI-powered watch-to-predict creator-led commerce prediction market platform across APAC (More)
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That’s all for today
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today's issue. More than that, I hope you’ve learned some actionable tips to build and grow your business.
You can always write to me by simply replying to this newsletter and we can chat.
See you again next week.
- Admond
Disclaimer: The Runway Ventures content is for informational purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed above belong solely to the author.
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