Marcelo Lombardo and the accountant next door

Marcelo Lombardo had customers to call and a question worth asking: how had they found Omie? The answer took his software company somewhere less fashionable than an advertising auction. Accountants were sending clients his way. They had discovered something useful in the product, and their recommendations were doing work that a marketing budget could otherwise have been paying for.

It is a pleasingly modest hinge for a technology story. A founder asks customers about their lives and learns that someone outside his company has been helping it grow. The accountant, often cast as the person who arrives after the interesting decisions, suddenly occupies the center of the plot.

Lombardo followed those referrals. Omie made accounting offices a priority route to Brazil’s small and medium businesses. Software that made an entrepreneur’s records easier to handle could also make the accountant’s work cheaper and less laborious. Both sides had a reason to participate. A recommendation carried a practical benefit along with the introduction.

The discovery helps explain the person running Omie today: a technically minded entrepreneur who pays attention to selling, an executive willing to reconsider his sales machinery, and a music enthusiast who once put a heavy metal guitarist in front of an audience concerned with accounting. His career contains several changes of direction. The recurring question is how to make something useful easier to adopt.

Before the cloud, there was a faulty chip

His early work was at Itautec, in hardware and technical maintenance. An internal system for tracking service calls became a bridge into business software. The problem was close enough to touch: a technical department needed to keep track of its work. Long before Omie sold management tools to other businesses, Lombardo was developing one for the place where he worked.

A 2007 professional biography records that he began as a hardware designer at 16, developing peripherals and specialist programs. It also records studies in telecommunications and electronic engineering, the latter at Mackenzie. By then he was associated with NewAge Software and had created CoreBuilder, a tool for developing applications. His experience covered both the machinery and the programs running on it.

NewAge served a different world from the one Omie would pursue. Lombardo spent 13 years building that earlier business, working in enterprise management software before turning toward smaller companies. Large organizations already bought such systems. Smaller businesses offered another kind of challenge: convincing people to introduce software where much of the work still lived in paper records or spreadsheets.

Omie became independent in 2013, with Rafael Olmos as cofounder. Its cloud model allowed businesses to use management software without maintaining a local server. The work it covered was ordinary and consequential: invoices, inventory, sales, finances and the information exchanged with an accountant. A business owner might never develop an affection for an ERP. Knowing what has been paid is affection enough.

The expensive way to meet a customer

The small business market attracted plenty of software companies. Lombardo recalled more than 90 competitors pursuing similar problems. Their competition extended to Google’s paid advertising, where he said the price of one keyword rose 37 times in four months. It was an awkward arrangement: investors supplied the money, startups competed for attention, and the advertising platform collected the proceeds.

His conclusion about early funding was blunt: “muito dinheiro no começo atrapalha a empresa.” Too much money at the beginning gets in the company’s way. In his account, readily available capital could encourage founders to copy expensive strategies instead of looking for a better route. The accountant partnerships offered a route grounded in what customers were already doing.

Consider the incentives. An accounting office needs usable information from its clients. A small business needs its records to support everyday decisions. Omie can help connect the two. When those records move through a shared process, the person advising the business has a reason to recommend the tool. Distribution and utility begin to reinforce each other.

Lombardo took Omie into franchising in 2015. Local operators could introduce the product, work with accounting offices and help the company reach customers across Brazil. In his 2022 account of the model, proximity mattered: different regions and businesses needed people who understood their circumstances. A cloud service still had to get acquainted with people on the ground.

What the numbers actually measure

By September 2025, Omie had 180,000 customers and R$600 million in annual recurring revenue. It had been generating cash since June 2023. That history matters when looking at the R$855 million Series D announced in September 2025 and led by Partners Group. A large transaction can say several things about a company. Its structure deserves as much attention as its headline.

The deal was mainly secondary: existing investors sold portions of their holdings, while retaining stakes. The full transaction value therefore should not be treated as fresh cash arriving in Omie’s operating account. Earlier backers included SoftBank, Riverwood and Astella. Partners Group’s entry brought a new shareholder to a company that had already built a substantial recurring business.

In 2026, Lombardo described Omie as supporting more than 200,000 Brazilian companies. He also reported more than R$400 billion in invoices issued annually by its customers. Those are customer invoices, a measure of activity passing through the system. They are distinct from Omie’s revenue. The difference is considerable, and worth keeping clear when an attractive number asks to be printed in large type.

His recognition followed the business’s growth. He was honored in the Emerging category of EY’s 2024 Entrepreneur of the Year program and received the 2026 Executivo de Valor award in the medium company category. In discussing the latter, he shared the credit with Omie’s employees. The awards provide milestones; the customers still provide the daily work.

Customer counts at two reported moments. These figures describe Omie’s business, not Lombardo’s personal finances.

A guitarist walks into an accounting event

At WeAreOmie in 2019, Lombardo helped arrange an opening speaker who prompted questions: Kiko Loureiro, known for his work with Angra and Megadeth. What did a guitarist have to offer an audience thinking about business management and accounting? Lombardo later wrote an article explaining the choice. Music had already experienced a brutal change in how its products reached customers.

His account connected that upheaval to the challenges facing accountants. It discussed audience loyalty, finding a market and adapting when technology changes the terms of a business. The setting made the point entertainingly literal. People had come to consider their professional future, and a musician was qualified to discuss what happens when the familiar commercial arrangement falls apart.

Lombardo’s music interest extends beyond choosing speakers. His public links include original music and DJ sets, and his October 2025 TalksbyLeo conversation devotes a chapter to music and DJing. The South Summit Brazil program in 2026 also put him on the bill for the event’s After Social party. A conference badge can evidently cover more than one job description.

There is a less flamboyant detail from a 2019 interview: he described a Monday meeting with his senior management team at 7:30 in the morning. His reading choices included books about negotiation, responsibility and constraints. Put the early meeting beside the DJ sets and a fuller person appears. Music shares the calendar with the unromantic routines of running a business.

The software he wants you to see less of

In April 2021, Lombardo published an essay called “O ERP vai sumir” - the ERP will disappear. He was describing a product ambition: remove routine data entry, connect financial processes and ask the user to intervene when something needs attention. The system would continue working, while demanding less visible work from the person using it.

“O ERP é o novo Internet Banking”

Marcelo Lombardo · April 2021
The ERP is the new internet banking.

His examples dealt with familiar administrative irritations. Enter information here, enter it again elsewhere, check whether a payment happened, reconcile the records. Each step might be manageable by itself. Together they consume time that a small business owner could spend on customers, staff or the actual goods and services being sold. His aspiration was to shorten that chain.

Omie’s June 2025 WhatsApp integration gave that ambition a recognizable interface. Users could carry out operations and request information through text or voice messages. The company’s documentation describes tasks such as checking inventory, generating payment slips and consulting business information. Using an application already embedded in someone’s day lowers one obstacle to using a management system.

The practical test is simple enough to state and difficult enough to execute: does the owner get the right result with less effort? Conversational software still has to perform the underlying business task correctly. A friendly message cannot compensate for a wrong invoice. Lombardo’s old concern with useful tools survives inside the newer language of artificial intelligence.

Buying back the road he built

In July 2026, Omie’s distribution story took another turn. The company ended its franchise model and spent R$100 million from its own resources to acquire the 92 units operating under it. The network that once supplied local relationships was being brought into the company. Lombardo linked the change to new technology and Omie’s greater recognition in the market.

The transition carried a human cost. The restructuring was expected to eliminate between 30% and 50% of the franchise network’s 500 jobs, with the remaining employees joining Omie’s own operation. Lombardo described mixed feelings about the decision. A founder can believe centralization will improve the business and still recognize that the change is painful for people involved.

This is the unresolved part of the story, and the interesting one. A founder discovers an effective route to customers, builds an organization around it, then decides that parts of that organization need to change. The accountant relationship remains central. The means of supporting it are being revised. The next results will determine how well that revision works.

Lombardo’s career began with tools for managing work and has returned repeatedly to the problem of getting people to use them. He can talk about cloud architecture, capital and AI. The question that changed Omie was more conversational. How did you hear about us? Somewhere in the answer was an accountant, introducing a client to software that made both their days easier.