GCP – Meet the EMEA startups and scaleups redefining their industries with cloud technology

Be they technology, fintech, gaming, or retail, examples abound of industries being disrupted and redefined by startups and scaleups. EMEA has become a hub of innovation, and we’re proud to say that many of these movers and shakers are Google Cloud customers. 

At the Google Cloud Born-Digital Summit on 25 March, we will gather technology leaders from different industries across the region to offer practical guidance based on their experiences. From scaling up with leaner teams, to building future-proof, secure applications from scratch, these organizations have done it all. And they achieved this while maximizing their Google Cloud resources, accelerating production, and minimizing costs. 

At Google Cloud, we’re excited to support the next generation of startups at every stage of their journey with cloud technology. Today, we bring you some of their stories and hope that their success inspires yours too.

Solving for smarter decisions

Since 2001, Danish-born Just Eat has been pioneering food delivery around the world. But to remain one step ahead, the company needed to view and use information in real time. While reporting double-digit growth year after year, scale and latency were becoming a problem, as growth means more data to handle. So in 2017, with a data engineering team collaborating on Google Workspace, Just Eat built a business intelligence and analytics solution with BigQuery at its core to serve restaurant partners and customers in a more efficient, data-driven way. 

Another company building its data ecosystem on top of technologies such as BigQuery, Looker, Dataflow, and Cloud AutoML is Trustpilot. The Danish consumer review website has evolved from startup to scaleup, but maintains its mission to help build trust online between consumers and businesses. The company is leveraging Google Cloud to support this mission by processing data efficiently and securely.

With global headquarters in Berlin Germany, Market Logic Software develops enterprise software that helps world leading brands to leverage their own market and consumer data to run an insights driven business. As the business continues to grow, Market Logic requires more performance and flexibility than its original bare metal architecture could offer, so the company now runs almost 100% of its workload on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). The switch halved the costs of running its nodes while enabling the company to scale up and down according to demand. Market Logic is now looking to leverage AI on Google Cloud to continue helping companies to make sense of all their data to drive quality decisions.

Another innovator investing in data analytics to help its customers is Israeli software company Wix. The website builder empowers 200 million users across 190 countries to create, manage, and grow their businesses online. Placing customer experience at its core, Wix now also provides an analytics solution for customers so they can access the kind of reports that helped Wix to succeed. Powering it is Looker, selected for its user-friendliness and cost-efficiency. 

Solving for global expansion

Booksy is a Polish technology company supporting small traders in the health and beauty sector with an app designed to take care of admin tasks, so they can focus on their core business. But when this startup took off, its infrastructure struggled to scale at speed. So Booksy created a scalable architecture able to match its fast-growing, global reach using GKE to orchestrate clusters and meet surges in demand. Booksy now handles twice as much traffic and helps more than 10 million businesses in 25 countries to transform the way they work.

In the UK, GoCardless offers a payment platform for businesses that have recurring revenues or accept one-off payments. But as it started to grow 50% year-over-year, GoCardless realized that its business units were losing valuable time looking for accurate data. To expand globally, its teams needed a better way to identify new opportunities, streamline processes, and maintain product quality and innovation. By leveraging Looker, 95% of GoCardless employees can access, trust, and act on the data they need to get their jobs done to help advance company growth, while the data team is free to focus on strategic projects. Now, the features that are most important to customers gain more attention, and the process of onboarding new clients has been streamlined, helping to accelerate global expansion.

Solving for scalability

BlaBlaCar is a French-born carpooling platform turned global community, with a mission to turn empty seats on the road into a new travel network. To make this possible, the company migrated its infrastructure from on-premises to Google Cloud to gain the scalability it needed to support 90 million drivers and passengers in 22 countries. The company is also branching out to different modes of transportation, leveraging cloud technology to test markets and products at scale with minimal investment. 

Also opting for a limitless cloud infrastructure is UK-based Arabesque AI. The financial services firm uses its proprietary artificial intelligence engine to analyze and predict financial market behavior and build customizable investment strategies. It selected Google Cloud to gain the elastic scaling it would need to meet rapidly increasing demand for AI solutions in financial markets. With GKE, the firm autoscales and smoothly deploys its solutions in multiple regions, while Cloud Run helps to automate more of its infrastructure management so the firm can work productively as a small team.

SEBx, the innovation studio of 165-year-old SEB, is building its next-generation banking platform in Google Cloud to leverage the benefits of cloud technologies, including cost efficiency, flexibility, and scalability. Using GCP products, including GKE, allows SEBx to reap the benefits of managed services, improve workflows, and optimise resource allocation. All this helps SEBx to focus on designing a new bank in the cloud that is tailored to meet their customers’ needs.

Solving for agility 

Gaming company King, headquartered in London and Stockholm, is succeeding in its competitive industry by validating its designs in an ingenious way. By using machine learning and AI capabilities, it determines the appropriate level of difficulty for a game without having to manually playtest it over a long period of time. With Cloud Deployment Manager to deploy GKE workloads, King creates and trains hundreds of virtual players. The resulting data is piped back to King’s data analytics modules with Cloud Pub/Sub, creating a feedback loop that lets King quickly optimize the design of its games based on a foundation of solid data.

Google Cloud can help you go from startup to scaleup to unicorn. Learn how at the Born-Digital Summit on Thursday 25 March at 9:30 GMT by registering at the Born Digital summit website.