Lappa is an Edinburgh-headquartered technology company that helps businesses report on their packaging waste and calculate the eco-fees they owe for it. As founder and CEO Olga Maksimova explains, every parcel that lands on your doorstep comes wrapped in packaging, and across Europe the sellers behind those parcels now pay for the waste they put on the market.
Olga moved to Edinburgh on a UK Global Talent visa, drawn by Scotland's talent and its long history of invention. Now on her third venture, she built the business first as Lovat, a tax compliance platform, before expanding into Lappa and Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) reporting, timed to the EU's Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR).
Techscaler, delivered by CodeBase, has been a constant throughout. Olga took part in the Silicon Valley pilot programme in February 2024 and the Singapore pilot that October, alongside the Reforge growth programme and Techscaler's founder community.
This is a case study on reading a market at the right moment and building for the world from Scotland.
Olga arrived at Lappa with two decades in business development, including a role as BD Director at MarkPrior, and two businesses founded: a tax advisory firm she successfully exited and a retail-tech company. Those ventures taught her to treat any starting assumption as perhaps 5% correct, then adapt once real clients respond.
That instinct shaped Lovat, which began as a tax compliance platform for businesses selling across borders. When users kept pointing to a more painful problem in eco-fee calculation and packaging waste reporting, the team followed them. Today, Lappa's software can recognise materials from a photo and report eco-fees to the authorities that collect them.
Before joining Techscaler, Olga was building Lovat in a mature tax compliance market, where American competitors with deep pockets invested heavily in innovation. Winning clients there took persistence, even with a product built on strong support and fresh ideas.
On a personal level, having newly arrived in Edinburgh, Olga knew founders who only work on their own projects risk burning out, and she wanted a regular source of what she calls fresh air.
Techscaler gave her a community of brave, like-minded founders, and soon became her route into growth education and new markets.
Olga went looking for a founder community on her very first day in Scotland, and Techscaler is where she found it. The welcome was so warm she felt the community had been waiting for her, and founders who had already taken the leap gave her courage.
From there came Techscaler's first Silicon Valley programme in February 2024. A pilot built around pop-up workspace in San Francisco, it let 12 Scottish founders shape their own agenda. Olga used that freedom to meet US clients, and Lappa has since credited the programme with finding the person who now leads its US sales.
Through Techscaler's Reforge membership, Olga took several courses, and the growth track proved the most powerful. Guest speakers from companies such as Duolingo shared practical ideas on adapting sales channels, and she returned repeatedly to the material on pricing, reworking Lappa's model many times with what she learned.
In October 2024, Olga joined Techscaler's Singapore pilot, splitting her time between BLOCK71 and the SWITCH conference. She saw that small businesses across APAC expect local support before treating a vendor as a partner, and that the market thrives on collaboration. On both trips, travelling as one of 12 founders meant she could spot small mistakes in others she might be making herself, and learn from peers a couple of steps ahead.
Lappa has since reached the moment every founder waits for. Olga describes product-market fit as the point where the market is ready and you are ready at the same time, and for Lappa it arrived with PPWR. As the regulation began to apply on 12 August 2026, requests from large corporations came in by the hundreds, and a recently secured ISO 27001 certification helped turn that demand into enterprise contracts.
Lappa now serves more than 3,000 clients across 48 countries, with Singapore as a base for clients in South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and China. Olga has since returned as an alumna, sharing that Singapore approach at a Techscaler roundtable at CodeBase with Nik Mehta, British High Commissioner to Singapore.
Over the next 12 months, Olga wants Lappa to become the world's number one EPR reporting provider. Getting there means opening a proper US office, where she expects demand to build next year, and adding AI recommendations that show clients how packaging changes can lower their eco-fees.
Olga, whose favourite book is The Wizard of Oz, often looks outside herself for bravery, and Techscaler, delivered by CodeBase, gave her a community to find it in. Singapore taught her to talk to real customers before spending anything on promotion in a new market. At CodeBase's US Expansion Dinner in May 2026, the conversation reinforced her view that ambitious founders can attract US investment without leaving Scotland.
Follow Lappa on LinkedIn for EPR updates and news on its international growth.
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