Case Study · SCALEUP
From 12 to 80 in 6 months — without breaking the company.
Series A FinTech, Berlin. Fresh €8M raise. Burning cash. Stalled product. Series B looked unreachable.
Six months later: Series B closed, cash runway doubled, founding team aligned.
The Problem
Raise was celebrated. Execution was stalling.
The founders had nailed product-market fit with a 6-person team. The €8M Series A felt like validation — so they hired fast. Then everything broke: cycle times doubled, product velocity crashed, founding team stopped talking, sales pipeline flatlined.
By the time we were introduced, six months of runway had evaporated with nothing to show for it. The board was nervous, the team was burned out, and the founders were whispering about their first layoff.
The Diagnosis
Classic Series A wall — structure hadn't caught up with headcount.
The SCALEUP diagnostic (7 pillars) surfaced the real problems: no sales operating rhythm, no engineering cadence, no clear ownership, and three founders still making every decision.
The product was fine. The people were great. The operating system was missing.
Most Series A startups don't fail because of product. They fail because nobody taught them how to run a company.
The Work
Six months of installing operating infrastructure.
Weekly exec rhythms. Quarterly OKRs tied to pillar metrics. Clear directly-responsible-individual (DRI) for every objective. Sales pipeline reviewed every Monday, not every quarter. Engineering cycle time cut in half through pairing and flow rules.
Org chart redesigned around the SCALEUP pillars, not departments. Senior hires made only for pillars where the founders genuinely couldn't operate.
Luis didn't give us advice. He gave us a mirror, a map, and the courage to walk.
Co-founder
Series A FinTech
The Outcome
Series B closed four months ahead of plan.
Sales velocity 4x. Burn cut 30% without layoffs. Cycle time from code commit to production dropped from 2 weeks to 3 days. Founding team sleeping again.
Most importantly: the team could now run without the founders in every meeting. Series B closed in Q5 — four months ahead of schedule.
Your company, next?
A 20-minute call is free. If SCALEUP is the right fit, we go from there.