Case Study: Acast achieves global, scalable podcast monetization and rapid innovation with Microsoft Azure

Swedish startup unlocks the hidden potential of podcasting for listeners, creators, and advertisers

Acast is a Swedish startup that provides an end-to-end podcast platform—hosting, distribution, analytics, ad services and a listening app—connecting listeners, creators and advertisers worldwide. Its dynamic ad-stitching model (with as many as 600 unique ad combinations per episode) and high traffic (around 50 million streams per month) made the service extremely compute‑intensive, while the company began with a very small engineering team and needed rapid global scaling and fast time‑to‑market.

Acast moved to Microsoft Azure’s PaaS and microservice architecture, leveraging Node.js, Traffic Manager and Azure Machine Learning to offload infrastructure, enable targeted ad insertion and power recommendation models. The result: rapid prototyping and demos within hours, up to 50 daily releases with no downtime, scalable global deployment (including a US datacenter), recommendation-driven personalization, strong advertiser insights, and a lean operations footprint supported by only a few developers—with additional growth support through Microsoft’s BizSpark program.

Acast

Johan Billgren

Chief Technology Officer