The Auditor Who Already Lived Through 2025 — Twenty Years Ago

Viktoriia Lezhanina brings time-tested risk management discipline from the era of overnight rate spikes and regulatory upheaval into the new era of expensive capital. 

The year 2025 began with a series of high-profile collapses for American venture capital. In April, California-based BaaS startup Solid, recently valued at over a billion dollars, filed for bankruptcy: cash ran out a full year ahead of forecast. Others followed. CB Insights recorded the highest average burn multiple since 2009 — 2.8×. For the first time in a decade venture capital funds began demanding positive unit economics before the next round of investment.

Money has become expensive again, and risk-assessment models built on the era of near-zero rates simply no longer work.

In this new reality, investors and accelerators are increasingly looking to people who have already survived harsh periods of capital decline — in practice, not from textbooks. One such expert is Viktoriia Lezhanina, with over 25 years of experience in banking audit and risk management, including over 12 years as head of Departments at banks and Audit Firms in an environment where one wrong decision could cost a bank its license within 24 hours. Since 2022, she has lived and worked in the United States, consulting with young entrepreneurs and small businesses through her company, Victorious LIFE 4 LLC, publishing research on the investment attractiveness of projects in the United States, particularly in agriculture. In 2025, she joined the jury of the Cases&Faces International Business Award. Her experience in “surviving when everything is falling apart” has suddenly become the scarcest resource in the market.

America 2025 — some similarities in the state of the economy for startups with the economies of the former CIS countries in the late-90s 

Today’s America is not experiencing hyperinflation or default, but for the first time in fifteen years, startups are simultaneously facing three problems that previously only emerged separately: expensive capital, sharp tightening of regulations (CFPB Section 1071, new FDIC rules for BaaS), and chronic lack of quality data following slashed marketing budgets. The result is a situation strikingly similar to the one in which Lezhanina worked for most of her career: capital is expensive, the regulator tightens the screws, and reliable reporting is practically non-existent.

She started her career in the late 1990s at Ukrainian banks, including the large Ukrprombank and the European Bank for Development and Savings,  during a period of high macroeconomic turbulence and frequent changes in regulatory requirements. Later, for twelve years, she worked as a Deputy Head of Retail Business and Head of Department for various banks and audit firms, where every day she had to reorganize processes so that clients received services faster and the bank remained profitable despite rate spikes and currency exchange rates.

That is why her approach — what she calls “adaptive skepticism,” a constant questioning of assumptions even when the numbers look good — was forged in situations where a mistake in assessing a single loan could collapse the entire loan portfolio and strip the bank of liquidity in a day, now serves as a reliable source of management guidance, complementing modern ML models trained on cheap-money-era data. Viktoriia recalls how she once had to manually check the operations of dozens of currency exchange offices and build reserves across the whole loan portfolio, relying not on algorithms but on a deep analysis of real cash flows. That skill proved invaluable when the 2008 global crisis hit banks, and many of them survived precisely thanks to the systems she helped build.

“The most common mistake I see in 2025 is overestimating the accuracy of one’s own algorithms,” says Viktoriia. “Many startups build models that do not account for regulatory, behavioral, and operational risks that cannot be algorithmized. Such models work great in presentations, but they don’t always protect the business.”

Three metrics that now decide everything 

“I have been working in finance since 1996 – in banks, as a member of the credit committee for many years, and as a head of department. “That’s when I came up with the idea of ​​helping borrowers stay afloat and achieve greater success – after all, it is benefits for the bank too,” Lezhanina recalls.

While still working in banking, she developed in 2005 a methodology for analyzing the effectiveness of financial resource management for small businesses, precisely in conditions of incomplete reporting and constant external shocks. Having moved into audit in 2008, Viktoriia headed banking audit departments at leading firms, conducting risk-based audits and implementing tools that allowed companies to grow even during crises. At the same time, she successfully applied her own approach. That methodology still forms the core of her work: it combines quantitative analysis with management logic and mandatory stress-testing. In 2025, Viktoriia published an article in The American Journal of Management and Economics Innovations applying this approach to U.S. agricultural projects, showing how to spot cash gaps while still at the planning stage.

In the current environment, she highlights three metrics that were barely discussed three years ago but now determine whether a company gets funding today. First — the ability to operate 18+ months without a new round at 5 %+ rates. Second — unit economics that stay positive without marketing subsidies. Third — having several pre-developed contingency plans. “Today liquidity and team discipline are more important than the speed of growth,” Lezhanina emphasizes.

Cases&Faces 2025: a jury with the strictest risk assessment filter 

In March 2025, in Fort Lauderdale, Viktoriia served on the jury of the Cases&Faces International Business Award, a major annual event in the USA with over a thousand applications from multiple countries. She judged the Financial Services and Innovator of the Year categories, applying the same “banking audit” that had once helped save real banks from collapse. Her criteria were exceptionally strict — many candidates were making the same mistakes she had seen in the corporate sector during past crises.

She was particularly impressed by the ByteBite project— an AI-CRM for restaurants. The team pre-tested the technology on real data, built a phased subscription model, and  implemented predictive analytics that automatically corrects AI errors. This significantly reduced operational and reputational risks. “This is an example of how innovation develops not chaotically, but with proper risk management at every level,” notes Lezhanina.

She asks founders one question: “Where can your model collapse twice as fast as you think?” Those who answer quickly and specifically usually survive. Those who start hedging often lose stability at the first shock.

Machine learning still falls short of manual audit in one key area: algorithms are aware of the past but cannot anticipate events that have not yet occurred. Viktoriia explains that an algorithm will not notice chaos in team processes or that the founder is turning a blind eye to a problem. Such vulnerabilities are often disguised as statistical anomalies, yet they determine a company’s fate.

From small businesses to a new generation of financial leaders 

In the United States, Lezhanina has already launched her company, Victorious LIFE 4 LLC, and is working to help young entrepreneurs and small businesses, which are often owned by immigrants, build financial resilience in the new reality based on strict adherence to new regulations. Her clients are small businesses that, like startups, face expensive and uncertainty. She applies the same principles she used on the jury: stress-testing cash flows, identifying hidden reserves, and developing contingency plans for unexpected changes

In parallel with this, Victoria is involved in volunteer work with the Take Stock in Children program, where she uses financial tools for career planning for teenagers. She helps them perceive the future not as a dream, but as a manageable project with risks and contingencies, which can be successfully implemented – just as she once helped banks and companies.

The year 2025 has shown that it is not the fastest or the most technologically advanced who win, but the most resilient. And today we have a unique situation and a unique chance to learn from experience: old-fashioned “adaptive skepticism” is once again becoming the most valuable asset for investors.