Case Study: Avant achieves 50% faster end-to-end builds and runs 2.5M daily tests with CircleCI

How Avant Runs 2.5 Million Daily Tests on CircleCI

Avant is an online lending platform serving middle‑income consumers in the US and UK with more than $3.6B in originated loans. Facing rapid growth and strict security requirements, Avant ran roughly 2.5 million tests per day and relied on a previous CI provider that was slow, opaque, and costly—causing long build times, queued builds, and difficulty debugging intermittent failures, which threatened the team’s ability to deploy multiple times per day.

Avant moved to CircleCI Enterprise, self‑hosting in a VPC on AWS and using spot instances, automatic test parallelization, and a custom Docker build image. These changes cut end‑to‑end build time from ~33 minutes to about 15 minutes (over 50% faster), reduced infrastructure costs, improved transparency and security, and unlocked API‑driven features like auto‑bisect and time‑travel builds—boosting developer productivity and confidence.

Avant

Tim Mertens

Test Engineering Manager