The idea for COSO wasn’t born in a boardroom, it came from the ground, quite literally. Between us, our team has decades of experience in delivering infrastructure projects across Asia. We’ve managed construction sites, led multi-agency coordination, handled design and planning, and pushed projects through their entire lifecycles in countries like India, Singapore, and Hong Kong. And everywhere we went, the story was the same. Cost overruns were expected.
Delays were built into the schedule. There was always a “next time” when things would improve, but that time never came. We found ourselves asking the same question. Why is this okay? As insiders, we saw how the industry had learned to live with the pain. Teams on the ground had gotten used to miscommunication. Project managers had built entire strategies around buffer periods. Stakeholders learned to interpret spreadsheets like detectives, trying to guess what was actually happening on-site.
Tools existed, but they were rigid, complex, or disconnected from the way construction actually happens. No one wanted to challenge the status quo because everyone was just trying to survive it. That’s when COSO started taking shape. We didn’t want to just add another tool to the pile. We wanted to solve for visibility, for clarity, for proactive management. We wanted to embed the lived experience of engineers and project managers into a digital solution, one that adapts to the user, not the other way around. The industry had settled for inefficiency.
We didn’t. COSO was built by people who have delivered infrastructure under pressure and know what is needed when you are in the trenches. The platform is a reflection of our shared frustration and our collective determination to change how projects are built, tracked, and completed.