Case Study: Kiva connects more lenders to borrowers through faster, more reliable platform performance with New Relic

Kiva Uses New Relic to Connect as Many Lenders to Borrowers as Possible to Alleviate Poverty

Kiva, the nonprofit micro-lending platform founded in 2005, connects individual lenders to borrowers worldwide to alleviate poverty. With more than a million active users and frequent traffic spikes (such as Match Days), Kiva needed high availability and fast performance but was struggling with production issues, fragmented diagnostic tools, and technical debt—constraints made more pressing by nonprofit budget limits.

Kiva adopted New Relic APM through its nonprofit program to consolidate monitoring and gain real-time visibility into slow queries, bottlenecks, and overloaded servers. The team used New Relic to pinpoint and fix problems quickly (for example, isolating problematic queries after a MySQL upgrade within an hour), improving site stability during peak loads, reducing troubleshooting time, and enabling targeted technical-debt remediation to increase loan throughput.

Kiva

Amy Risch

Distinguished Software Engineer