Groww makes investments simple and accessible, using Google Kubernetes Engine to ensure a reliable platform for customers, and makes data-backed decisions to grow its business with BigQuery.

About Groww

Headquartered in Bangalore, Groww is India’s fast-growing online investment platform that offers a simple and easy way to invest in stocks, direct mutual funds, IPOs, ETFs, and digital gold. Its mission is to make investing as intuitive and accessible as ecommerce.

Industries: Technology

Location: India

Google Cloud results

• Reduces hardware costs with Preemptable Virtual Machines
• Enables a lean DevOps team with Google Cloud
• Analyzes data effectively and quickly for agile business growth

Investing is one way to ensure financial security. However, the thought of it can be a daunting one, especially for people without any prior experience. With a mission to make investment simple for digital natives in India, Groww was launched in 2016.

“We noticed that many people were on social media, booking cabs, and ordering food online, but the same people were not investing, despite having the means to do so,” says Singh. This observation led to a lightbulb moment for the team, and they realized that in order to appeal to the millennial, mobile-savvy generation, they had to create an investment platform that was as easy to use as an ecommerce platform.

Managing unpredictable spikes with Google Kubernetes Engine

As with any platform, there are bound to be peak and non-peak hours when it comes to traffic. For Groww, regular spikes take place in the early mornings, or in the evenings when people are more relaxed having come home from work. But the nature of the fintech industry is a volatile one. Investors are only human, and their investment decisions can be swayed quickly by the news. As such, spikes in traffic can happen at the most unpredictable times. To cope with this unpredictability, Groww uses Google Kubernetes Engine to scale up and down automatically to meet the required capacity around the clock. This also helps the company save costs, as it pays only for what is needed.

“No matter how much of an expert you are, you can never predict when traffic on the platform will be heavy,” says Singh. “Google Kubernetes Engine helps ensure that we never run out of capacity, without overspending on infrastructure cost.”

More recently, the investment company started using Preemptible Virtual Machines, which run at one third of its hardware cost. It also leverages Anthos to monitor and manage its backend infrastructure and to have better workload visibility. Singh shares, “We are very open to adopting new technologies, and our team is always eager to learn if we can do things better. We believe that technology is always evolving and it’s our responsibility to learn and make use of what’s available out there.”

Despite having so much running in the background, Singh explains that the company keeps a very lean DevOps team. “We’ve only got four or five people in DevOps, and that’s only possible because Google Cloud products are already able to run on their own.”

Making swift, data-backed business decisions

Infrastructure is only part of the equation for a successful business. Outside of operations, the ability to analyze data effectively is arguably the most important component for a startup to thrive. Groww leverages BigQuery to make decisions quickly and efficiently. “With BigQuery, we have a place where we can put all data, fire queries, and build dashboards almost instantly, allowing us to make business decisions quickly,” explains Singh.

The team also uses Looker Studio to clearly visualize the information generated through charts and graphs. The best part? Groww doesn’t need to spend additional time and resources setting up a large data team, since BigQuery does most of the work and in a shorter period of time. The resources saved also enables the team to focus on addressing functional requirements, rather than managing and sizing the data platform.

“From a startup perspective, BigQuery is really helpful because often setting up your own data lake can be very costly, and a distraction when the team is also busy focusing on setting up an infrastructure,” adds Singh.

Ensuring security and compliance with Google Cloud

As a fintech company, security and compliance continue to be top priorities for Groww. It chose Google Cloud as its preferred cloud provider because there are three data center replication zones in Mumbai, which means it adheres to financial regulations for keeping its user data within borders.

Moving forward, Groww plans to evolve its platform alongside its users. Singh says, “As we gain more users with different wants and needs, it will be a natural progression that the company evolves. I believe that with Google Cloud, we are well equipped to pave the way to the future.”

Editor’s note: Today’s post is written by Hatim M, Chief Commercial Officer at BungkusIT. The on-demand delivery service delivers packages within the hour for one million customers across Malaysia and uses Google Maps Platform to create a seamless end-to-end delivery experience for its customers.

Imagine it’s the end of a long day at work, and you’re heading home for dinner as you look forward to a restful evening. Then just as you arrive at the doorstep, your phone buzzes with a message from a family member, asking if you could grab a carton of milk from the supermarket.

With moments like these in mind, we founded BungkusIT to alleviate the stress of everyday chores and give people a break from having to run seemingly mundane errands that can often be time-consuming. With so much to do and so few hours in a day, we want to make life simpler by providing our customers with an on-demand delivery service.

As a social enterprise, our mission is to create jobs and increase earning potential for BungkusIT roadies (those who run deliveries), while also increasing online visibility for  local small and medium enterprises through an e-commerce platform. As such, we don’t charge merchants a fee for being featured on our app. 

Our roadies help connect users with products and services that they need. Whether it’s picking up the keys you forgot, or buying a birthday cake for a loved one, our on-demand roadies can help accomplish your task quickly and efficiently. In fact, we’ve helped many seniors—a large and often underserved population—to run errands and provide last mile support.

Providing reliable service, 24/7

From the day we launched, our promise has always been to complete every task given to us within one hour. Google Maps Platform empowers us to fulfil this promise. We understand the importance of selecting a reliable mapping service from the get-go. After exploring different map products, we made the decision to go with Google Maps Platform due to its detailed and accurate location mapping system. With the support of our partner Searce, we’ve been able to quickly integrate all the relevant products on our platform and optimize our API calls.

On a day-to-day basis, our roadies rely on the Places API to navigate their journeys. It pinpoints the exact location set by customers so that our roadies can be sure they arrive at the correct destination. With so many small roads and alleys in Malaysia, it can be challenging to find the exact place based on an address. Dropping a pin on a specific location removes any confusion.

Because we price our services based on distance, it’s business critical to determine the exact distance of a location and the most efficient route to reach it. By automating that process with the Distance Matrix API, we can guarantee that customers don’t get overcharged, while making sure that we’re adequately compensated for our services.

Improving the user experience

At the end of the day, we want to make people’s lives easier. That’s why having an app that is intuitive is key. More than that, we want customers to be able to create a request as quickly as possible. By automatically completing the location a customer is typing after they’ve keyed in the first few characters, Place Autocomplete does that job for us. 

As a fairly young company, we’ve got a long way to go. I believe that we’ll continue evolving alongside Google Maps Platform and exploring the new features it has to offer. We’re already talking to global brands to expand our services and I’m confident that with Google Maps Platform as our maps partner, we will go a long way.

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.

During uncertain times, ecosystem partnerships that leverage APIs have proven to help companies scale and address gaps in their businesses. Apigee customers, like CHAMP Cargosystems, have pursued API-first ecosystem models to enter adjacent markets, create new customer interaction models, and rapidly grow their brand reach and partner ecosystems. As a result of building their API ecosystem, they are transacting 300 million electronic exchanges and 20 million shipments per year.

CHAMP selected Apigee to provide an API platform and developer self-service portal option to all of its SaaS customers. Google Cloud’s Apigee API management platform and portal allows CHAMP and its customers to quickly connect to a variety of backend systems, including in-house, third party apps, marketplace portals and more– thereby accelerating their digitization strategies and opening up new markets through an API ecosystem.

Join this webcast and hear from this leading Enterprise company on how to:

• Identify new revenue sources and markets using an API management platform
• Improve time to market while still complying with all industry requirements
• How to create a proof of concept to grow API adoption throughout your organization
• Align internal business leaders and partners to see the importance of an API-first platform vision

When public health officials in Quebec set out to provide COVID-19 vaccination services for their 8 million residents in February 2021, they needed an easy-to-use, scalable solution to schedule appointments online. To make it simple for Quebecers to register for vaccines, the goal was to use Clic Santé, a familiar online portal built on Google Cloud and already in use to schedule flu vaccines and other health-related services. Trimoz Technologies, the portal’s creator, prepared to meet high-volumes of traffic by creating a seamless appointment scheduling experience.

To meet demand, Trimoz relied on Google Cloud – optimizing it for the expected surges. As an enterprise solutions provider to the public sector in Canada, Google Cloud scaled to meet the ongoing surges in traffic to the Clic Santé portal, with the stability and reliability the portal needed. At its peak surge, Clic Santé scheduled 365,000 appointment schedules in a single day, and on average, continues to handle a volume of roughly 50,000 appointments per day. Since launching their appointment scheduling service, Clic Sante has been able to deploy up to a over dozen new appointment functionalities each month with no service interruptions, while maintaining up to 3,000 vaccination and 1,500 pharmacies sites to serve the population.

“Thanks to our talented and agile team and the flexibility of Google Cloud, we performed hundreds of new releases and added new features and functionalities, without interrupting our services and while maintaining flawless security. We found extraordinary capacity to resolve complex problems with simple solutions
Stéphane Lajoie
CEO of Trimoz Technologies

Google Cloud services that helped build a more secure, flexible and scalable portal used by millions

The main components of Clic Santé are hosted using different services to give the team at Trimoz more flexibility with their platform functionality. The portal’s user interface, for example, was built using AppEngine, a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution, that hosts websites and automatically scales up and down based on the load. AppEngine allows the portal to deploy its web interface without having to manage the infrastructure. Trimoz implemented Cloud SQL, another PaaS solution, to run instances of relational-type databases without needing to manage the infrastructure. Changing the number of instances based on active users gave them more freedom to scale as needed without affecting portal users.

Various healthcare organizations (CIUSSS and CISSS) required appointment-level metrics gathered from Clic Santé to track progression towards their vaccination goal. To handle this, Trimoz uses BigQuery, a serverless data warehouse service from Google Cloud. This service handles data storage economically and allows for future analysis as needed so Trimoz can ensure all data, at rest and in motion, is encrypted to protect the platform and its users.

A reliable, user-friendly vaccination experience for Quebec

Through the partnership between Trimoz and Google Cloud, the vaccine appointment-scheduling portal handles 80,000 connections on average per day, with zero service interruptions. It also provides a user-friendly interface that can handle swells of traffic as needed. This reliability of the solution was one factor among many that helped reach the goal of vaccinating “75% of the admissible population” three weeks early., making Quebec’s population one of the most vaccinated populations in the world.

The performance and scalability of the platform will now allow Trimoz Technologies to expand into new markets like pharmacies, other healthcare organizations in other Canadian provinces, U.S. or European markets.

Clic Santé in numbers:

• More than 7,000,000 unique users
• 50,000 appointments set in average per day
• Peak of 365,000 daily appointments
• 80,000 connections per day in average
• 100% uptime of the Clic Santé platform
• 4 to 12 new production releases per month

Google Cloud is already widely available for public sector organizations in Canada. We are actively expanding with new regions and solutions with the highest compliance and standards and are committed to providing Canada with the quality service they need from a public sector cloud provider.

To learn more, visit the Google Cloud for Canada public sector solutions page.