StoryCorps, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving and sharing stories from people across America, faced a significant challenge in managing a vast amount of files and contacts. The organization works with thousands of people each year, and their stories are heard by many thousands more. This resulted in a massive amount of data to manage, including information about donors, contributors, and fans. The organization used Salesforce as a central repository for grant, donor, partnership, and end-user engagement information. However, keeping this data up-to-date and enriched was a daunting task. The challenge was further compounded by the need to track various touchpoints a person has had with the organization, which could range from social media interactions to website visits and podcast engagements.

Museum Hack, a company that used to run public museum tours and offer private tours for team-building events, was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. The need for social distancing made their traditional business model untenable. The company decided to pivot to a virtual team-building service, called TeamBuilding, but faced several challenges. Firstly, they needed to manage leads from prospect to closed sale, a task that was becoming increasingly complex due to the high demand for their new service. Secondly, they had to identify qualified leads and prioritize action, a process that had to be revisited due to changes in their business model. Thirdly, they needed to streamline general operations, as routine tasks were becoming time-consuming for their rapidly growing business. Lastly, they had to ensure smooth handoff of new clients to the logistics team, a task that was often overlooked due to long working hours.

Small businesses often struggle with the overwhelming number of apps and tools available for various aspects of their operations. These include customer relationship management (CRM) systems, sales automation tools, and email marketing tools. The challenge lies in managing these tools efficiently and cost-effectively. For instance, Synduit, a content and virtual marketing company, needed a way to track client feedback and manage workflows. Similarly, Project Warrior, a UK-based fitness program, required a system to manage contacts and schedule consultations. YP3 Solutions, a product engineering consultation firm, sought the best tools to aid their clients' R&D departments and engineering needs.

Swapnil Wale, the founder of Techno-PM, a project management template producer, was facing a significant challenge in delivering his digital products to customers. The process was manual and time-consuming, requiring Swapnil to monitor each purchase, confirm payment, and then send an email to the customer with their digital product. This process was not only inefficient but also unsustainable as it took away valuable time that could be used for managing growth and creating new resources. Furthermore, the lack of an immediate delivery system for digital products was potentially damaging to the customer experience, as customers expect instant access to digital products post-purchase.

Vocal, a publishing platform that connects creators with storytelling tools and engaged communities, faced significant scaling challenges as it grew. With over 1.2 million creators and roughly 11 million monthly readers, the company was struggling to manage the increasing volume of story submissions and the need for targeted nurture campaigns for creators. The manual process of updating story status in PostgreSQL and sending it to the moderation team for review was tedious and time-consuming. Additionally, the Business Intelligence team wanted to enrich their creator data to send the right nurture content at the right time. They had valuable data in PostgreSQL and Stripe but lacked the time to aggregate the data and assign email campaigns manually.

The Ruby Tap, a self-serve wine bar in suburban Milwaukee, Wisconsin, faced a significant challenge due to the social distancing measures necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. As a business built around people gathering, the inability for customers to visit the bar threatened its survival. The uncertainty of when normal operations could resume meant that the business had to quickly adapt to the new circumstances. The initial solution was to offer curated wine for curbside pickup through their website. However, the team quickly realized that the form they used for customers to purchase bottles was not sufficient. They needed a more efficient way to track sales, manage orders, and handle customer preferences.

Affini-Tech, a France-based company, was founded with the primary goal of helping businesses make data-driven decisions. To achieve this, they needed to provide their customers with easy workflows and web-based interfaces for analyzing and managing Big Data at an affordable cost. However, they faced the challenge of finding a scalable solution for building applications and analyzing information. They initially explored several cloud vendors and even deployed storage on another large public cloud. But they needed a platform that was not only competitively priced but also developer-friendly and integrated for building complex applications.

Credit is a vital component of any financial system. However, for banks and other financial institutions, making credit available to those who need it can be a complex process. The credit scoring models used by financial companies often fail to reflect the actual financial behavior of individuals. In France, banks and lenders often base their lending decisions on outdated socioeconomic factors, such as marital status, which may not accurately represent the financial stability of a customer. Algoan, a fintech startup, aimed to make credit scores more transparent and representative of the applicants’ actual financial behavior rather than demographic signifiers. Launched in 2018, Algoan sought to provide financial institutions with a digital platform designed to improve their lending decisions by making them faster and more relevant to the circumstances of each customer. However, to achieve this, Algoan needed an infrastructure that balanced power, stability, and security.

Apex America, an Argentinian company specializing in customer experience, was seeking to digitally transform its services to enhance its competitiveness and offer superior customer service. The company, which operates in multiple Latin American countries, was looking to leverage digital technology to transform its clients' conversations and provide efficient, innovative, and cost-effective solutions. Apex America's mission was to help other companies create value and boost brand loyalty without losing sight of end users. However, the company needed a reliable partner to help it achieve its digital transformation goals and enhance its conversation management services.

Apxor, a company that helps mobile app companies grow and retain subscribers, was facing challenges with its existing cloud provider. The company needed to process 1.5 billion data points daily to help its clients develop personalized user experiences. However, the infrastructure of their previous cloud provider was causing deployment issues. Additionally, the company was struggling with managing its infrastructure, which was taking away valuable time from its DevOps team that could have been used to focus on new product road maps. Apxor also needed to improve app discoverability and user retention for its clients, as users typically decide within 30 to 60 seconds whether they want to keep an app.

Attraqt, a leading expert in merchandising-led shopping experiences, was faced with the challenge of scaling its services to meet the increasing demands of its 300 plus clients. The company's platform, which combines AI with human creativity, is used by more than 50% of France’s biggest ecommerce sites. However, the platform needed to handle large volumes of API queries per second and continually optimize the potential of customer data in real time. In 2017, this volume was an average of 600 prediction requests per second, tripling to 2,000 per second in the sales season. Additionally, the platform needed to rapidly scale during the sales season or when a big client comes on board. As the platform's customer base grew, it needed to grow its ability to scale further, while reducing the amount of operational work for its teams.

Auteco Mobility, a leading sustainable-mobility company in Colombia, was facing challenges in optimizing data usage to improve decision-making and spend its time more strategically on portfolio, analytical, and operational processes. The company was struggling with scattered databases, which often took weeks to retrieve data from. This was a significant hindrance to the company's ability to make timely and informed decisions. Additionally, the company was also facing difficulties in tracking its users' experiences, which was crucial for improving its services and products. The company needed a solution that could streamline its data analytics processes, improve user experience tracking, and automate its processes.

Autheos, an Amsterdam-based video marketing company, was faced with the challenge of developing a unique AI video marketing platform that could deliver individualized consumer acquisition solutions for global brands. The company's vision was to use artificial intelligence to solve the age-old problem of wasted advertising dollars by providing personalized, real-time internet marketing. However, to turn this vision into reality, Autheos needed a powerful data analytics solution to power algorithms designed to connect brands with individual consumers. The company also faced the challenge of proving the correlation between video and consumer behavior, which required massive data crunching to reach the proof-of-concept stage.

Backflip Studios, a mobile game development studio, faced a significant challenge in the rapidly evolving mobile games market. The company needed to launch games quickly and release frequent updates to keep players engaged. In 2009, most mobile games had minimal server infrastructure, but as games evolved to include frequent content updates, cross-device play, community events, player communication, and sophisticated data analysis, a robust server infrastructure became crucial. The unpredictability of user influx, especially when games were featured on an app store or review site, posed another challenge. Backflip Studios also needed to analyze the data collected from their games to understand player behavior and improve game features.

Best Day, a Mexican tourism company, aimed to become the leading travel agency in Latin America. To achieve this, they needed to optimize their cloud-based operations and become more efficient. The company faced three main challenges: maintaining availability and performance at a low cost, automating as many operations as possible, and processing data in real time for better business decisions and an AI-powered customized experience. Their online platform, a crucial tool for marketing their services, required constant updates and a modern upgrade to make operations sustainable. They also experienced stability issues with their cloud-based database environment with their previous provider.

Birdz, a subsidiary of Nova Veolia, is a leader in smart water metering services and other smart city solutions. The company has over 1.5 million sensors and has sold over 6 million modules. However, Birdz faced a significant challenge in delivering data quickly and in a form that is easily accessible and readable. The company's legacy on-premises database was no longer able to cope with the volumes of data required, and the maintenance, upgrading, and licensing costs were becoming prohibitive. The system's limitations were also hindering the company's growth. Birdz needed a solution that would improve the performance of its analytics, enable it to scale up, and work internationally.

Bitsmedia, a Singapore-based tech company, developed the Muslim Pro app to cater to the needs of the global Muslim community. The app, which offers religious, lifestyle, and community features, experienced exponential growth, reaching 75 million users in over 200 countries. However, this rapid growth presented a challenge in terms of scalability, especially during the holy month of Ramadan when the app's traffic surged from about four million daily users to roughly 10 million. The company also faced the challenge of handling hundreds of millions of daily server requests and ensuring maximum security for sensitive religious data.

BlaBlaCar, a leading long-distance carpooling platform, was facing challenges with its on-premises infrastructure. Initially built to support the French market, the infrastructure was struggling to keep up with the company's rapid global expansion. The company was experiencing issues with returning carpool search results consistently, processing payments, and connecting drivers and passengers. The engineering team was spending more time maintaining servers rather than focusing on enhancing platform features. The company needed a scalable, data-driven infrastructure that could support its growing global community and meet users’ needs in real time.

Blacklight Studio Works, a mobile gaming company, faced the challenge of managing and analyzing vast amounts of data from millions of daily users to improve player engagement and in-app revenue. The company needed to understand user behavior and app performance to create a viable game economy. The challenge was to find the right balance between complexity and rewards to keep users engaged and willing to make in-app purchases. The company also needed to accelerate app development, ensure user data safety, and support remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The situation was further complicated by a 300% increase in downloads and daily active users due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Boutir, a Hong Kong-based online commerce platform, was created with the vision of empowering merchants by allowing them to set up mobile shops within minutes. The platform handles everything from ordering to checkout, delivery, and end-client notifications automatically. Since its inception in 2014, Boutir has expanded across Asia, serving over 100,000 merchants. However, the company faced challenges in delivering a seamless development experience, real-time data analytics, and unlimited scalability. The COVID-19 crisis further exacerbated these challenges as the demand for online shopping surged, causing systems to crash due to high demand. Boutir also needed a solution that would allow for continuous innovation without service interruptions and the ability to test different app versions in new markets.

Brain Corp, an AI software leader, powers the world's largest fleet of autonomous mobile robots operating in commercial indoor public spaces. The company's technologies power more than 26,000 autonomous robots, including the world's largest fleet of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) operating in public spaces. These AMRs are used by leading retailers as well as airports, malls, warehouses, hospitals, offices, and schools, and include floor scrubbers, vacuums, and inventory scanners. However, these AMRs face dynamic challenges, such as people intentionally or unintentionally obstructing their paths. To maximize ROI, Brain Corp focuses on AI and ML software development. However, the company faced challenges in terms of scalability, safety, security, and data privacy. The company needed a cloud platform that could scale to store, process, and secure all the data generated by the robots in real time.

The Ethereum network has seen a surge in usage, with over 177 million Ethereum addresses in existence and tens of thousands added each day. This high network usage, while signaling strong adoption, also points to a need for scalability and privacy-enhancing solutions. The challenge was to provide a solution that could handle the increasing demand for transactions on the Ethereum Mainnet and permissioned blockchains, while also ensuring privacy and confidentiality of transactions. The need for scalability was particularly pressing in areas such as decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFT), gaming, Web 3.0 and the metaverse, where the creativity of projects on Ethereum is exploding.

The Bank of Korea was seeking a partner for its Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) pilot project. The project aimed to develop a digital version of the Korean Won with advanced features such as cross-border payments, offline payment, and integration with digital asset systems. The project was divided into two phases, with the first focusing on basic functionality such as creating, issuance, and redemption of the digital won, and the second phase exploring more advanced features. The challenge was to develop a secure, transparent, highly available, auditable, and efficient digital currency system that could handle both confidential wholesale transfers and scalable retail transactions.

Breaktime, a Taiwan-based company founded in 2017, provides data consulting services to bloggers and publishers to generate advertising revenue. The company operates the Zi Media Network and the Zi Power Ads AI advertising allocation system. The goal of Zi Power Ads AI is to simplify the use of 'supply-side platforms' for publishers to sell digital advertising impressions via automated auctions. However, Breaktime faced challenges with their initial infrastructure. They launched Zi Power Ads AI on infrastructure in an internet data center in Taiwan and then moved to a cloud infrastructure provider to support increasing traffic volumes. However, they encountered reliability and stability issues, including virtual machine shutdowns that prevented Zi Power Ads AI from being available to publishers for extended periods. This led Breaktime to evaluate other providers.

Remind, a communication platform designed to facilitate interaction between educators, students, and parents, supports over 20 million monthly users. With such a vast user base, the platform is entrusted with a significant amount of personal data. The challenge was to ensure the security of this data and maintain compliance with various privacy regulations. The platform needed to protect against potential threats such as brute force attacks and credential stuffing, while also ensuring low false positives. Furthermore, the platform required a solution that could seamlessly integrate with its multi-platform applications and provide automated protection.

The healthcare sector is a complex ecosystem that requires seamless coordination and collaboration between various participants including doctors, clinicians, nurses, administrative staff, and patients. However, the lack of proper coordination and collaboration often leads to administrative waste, which is estimated to exceed $200B annually in the US. This inefficiency accounts for up to 34% of total healthcare costs. The costs are even higher when considering the real health consequences of delayed or improper diagnosis due to misinformation. Furthermore, the healthcare sector deals with sensitive data, including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), which cannot be shared outside of the immediate network. Therefore, healthcare workers need to have confidence in the data they use, and healthcare organizations need to ensure data integrity and know that the data was not tampered with.

In July 2021, renowned artist Damien Hirst released his first NFT collection, 'The Currency', on Palm, an Ethereum sidechain. The collection consisted of 10,000 NFTs, each corresponding to a unique physical artwork stored in a secure vault in the UK. The project aimed to explore the boundaries of art and currency, challenging collectors to choose between the digital NFT or the physical artwork, with the unchosen one being destroyed. The challenge was to successfully allocate, mint, and distribute these NFTs to over 32,000 users from 130 countries who applied to purchase them. The process needed to be seamless and accessible, even for users new to the Web3 space. Furthermore, the project required a secure and efficient platform to handle the high volume of transactions and the unique nature of the NFTs.

The rise of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) has revolutionized the way artists and creators connect with buyers, fans, and collectors. However, the current NFT ecosystem, primarily based on Ethereum's blockchain, faces significant challenges. These include high gas costs, slow transaction finality, and a lack of energy efficiency, with proof of work systems consuming vast amounts of energy. Additionally, there is a need for a platform that can support the trading of art assets within the ecosystem. The challenge was to create an NFT ecosystem that addresses these issues while providing an optimized experience for artists and creators.

The Life & Annuities industry faces significant challenges in data sharing during the death notification process. Deceased individuals often have overlapping financial products across multiple carriers, leading to potential matching of these deceased individuals among the carriers' claims records. This situation creates a need for a secure, efficient, and timely data exchange system. The process of notifying all parties holding a policyholder's policy upon their death is time-consuming, costly, and risky. Furthermore, when a deceased individual had policies or financial instruments with more than one carrier, a median of a 55-day gap in payment exists for the second carrier payout. This delay indicates that one carrier often learns of the death earlier than others, highlighting the need for a system that can expedite the death benefits process.

The life insurance industry has been grappling with the challenge of not having a single, reliable source of truth for processing death benefits and claims. This lack of a centralized system has led to multiple handoffs between different systems and people, which not only increases the time taken to process claims but also escalates the cost and risk associated with it. The absence of a unified platform also places an unnecessary burden on the beneficiaries, who often have to navigate through complex procedures and multiple points of contact to claim their benefits. The industry was in dire need of a solution that could streamline the process, reduce the cycle time, and make it more efficient and less cumbersome for all stakeholders.