Founders Everywhere: Harm-Julian Schumacher
Harm-Julian Schumacher is the co-founder and CEO of OneLot, an end‑to‑end, verticalized financing platform for used car dealers in the Philippines.
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The Philippines’ used car market is booming, but the dealers driving that growth have been constrained by how they provide financing to their customers. Many rely on their own capital or slow, traditional lenders that are not built for the speed and flexibility of the industry. Now these dealers can use OneLot, the Manila-based fintech that provides working capital and digital tools designed specifically for used car dealers. Its AI-native platform underwrites businesses in hours instead of weeks, allowing dealers to move faster, buy more inventory, and scale their operations with less friction.
Harm-Julian Schumacher, co-founder and CEO, grew up around his family’s Mercedes-Benz dealership in Germany, which gave him early insight into how car retail and financing work in practice. He did some undergraduate studies in Southeast Asia and developed a strong personal affinity for the region before eventually moving to the Philippines. He met co-founder and COO Tommy Campos, a former operator at Uber and Postmates, through their first local investor. Subramaniam Srinivasan, CTO, joined later as technical co-founder after they connected through a mutual contact in Indonesia. The three previously built a quick-commerce company together, an experience that helped them build trust, pressure-test ideas, and establish a strong working dynamic before starting OneLot.
What’s OneLot’s North Star?
As a lending business, our North Star is net interest income. It’s effectively our gross profit after cost of capital and loan losses. It’s easy to grow a loan book by handing out cheap capital, but that doesn’t mean you’re building a healthy company, so we focus on growing in a clearly profitable way. That metric forces us to balance growth, risk, and unit economics instead of chasing vanity volume.
Tell us about some recent milestones OneLot crushed.
The first few years were about building the foundation by onboarding dealers, building the platform, and proving the model. In 2026, we launched pilots for our consumer financing product, which lets us finance both dealers and the customers buying their cars. We’re also integrating AI agents across the company to automate sales, customer support, credit analysis, underwriting, and internal operations. This is making the business faster, more scalable, and more efficient.
Why will OneLot win?
It really comes down to two things. First, we’re digital and AI‑native, which lets us move faster, be more data‑driven, and take better, quicker credit decisions while always being available for customers. Second, we’re obsessively focused on a single vertical (used cars) while most competitors are horizontal lenders or marketplace players. That focus lets us build highly tailored underwriting models, specialized processes, and very specific products for used‑car dealers, all wrapped in a deeply vertical, AI‑enabled platform.
How do you think about work–life balance for yourself and your team?
For me, work–life balance doesn’t mean 9‑to‑5. In a startup leadership role, that’s just not realistic. I typically work six or seven days a week, but I make sure I have anchors like sports and time away from the laptop to clear my head, and I want everyone in senior roles to have their own version of that. At the same time, I’m very conscious about burnout: we work incredibly hard, but I don’t believe in burning through people. If I see someone online late in the evening too often, I’ll tell them to shut the laptop and go home early another day, because in the mid to long term, protecting our human capital is non‑negotiable.
Any favorite books?
I often recommend Yuval Harari’s Sapiens and, even more so, Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, which explores how potent genes shape evolution and extends that as an analogy to ideas, or “memes” that spread through societies when they help those societies function and grow.
Fun fact:
I’m really into water sports and anything with a bit of adrenaline: kitesurfing, sailing, freediving. I enjoy those activities a lot, even if my enthusiasm (and the occasional accident) doesn’t always make my mum very happy.
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