Case Study: Kahuna boosts engagement 43% and scales to 80M users in a day with Google Cloud Platform

Kahuna The first SaaS platform built for digital marketplaces

Kahuna is a SaaS platform for digital marketplaces that helps ride‑sharing, classifieds, ecommerce and other marketplaces deliver highly personalized buyer and seller engagement. The core challenge it solves is communicating at scale and in real time—identifying the right product, message, timing, device and channel for tens to hundreds of millions of users while handling highly spiky, unpredictable traffic and keeping data fresh for campaign decisions.

Kahuna built its platform on Google Cloud (App Engine, BigQuery, Stackdriver and ML tools), streaming tens of billions of events per day and delivering user-record updates in about 4 seconds. The solution scales dynamically—onboarding as many as 80 million users in a day and absorbing unplanned 5x traffic spikes—while its machine learning increased engagement and goal conversion by up to 43%, marketplace cross-sells by 40% and classifieds repeat purchases by 43%.

Kahuna

Jacob Taylor

Cofounder and CTO