Kovi reaches 10 thousand drivers with its AWS based structure.

Kovi was born almost three years ago, aiming to offer car rental services for app. drivers. The company has benefited 10 thousand drivers in this period, who count on the platform not only to rent cars, but to manage their work and monitor the cars’ movement and maintenance needs. The development and deployment of the Kovi platform was made possible thanks to the use of the AWS infrastructure, which ensured the scalability, flexibility and automation required for its operation.

Kovi was created in June 2018 by Adhemar Neto and João Costa, a former general manager and former product director from 99, respectively. The idea was born from this experience, aiming to ensure drivers did not leave the ride-sharing platform as frequently. “We had a very high acquisition cost, and a churn that also followed growth,” remembered Costa.

When further researching the problem, the two executives noticed that the cost of the car itself was too high for drivers. It wasn’t just about acquisition costs, or rent, but also maintenance, insurance, fuel and others that hindered profit. “We decided to put this enterprise together to solve this problem,” states Costa, and let’s not forget that 80% of drivers are registered in more than one app., which ensures them a greater volume of rides.

The idea was to offer rental cars obtained through partnerships with automakers, lease companies and rental companies, with benefits such as insurance, maintenance and facilitated payment, with everything developed based on app. drivers’ needs. To achieve this, the operation had to be based on a platform that would centralize the relationship with clients and the cars’ management.

According to Costa, the biggest challenge was finding vendors whose solutions scaled as the operation grew. “They had to support this growth and allow us to be born 100% cloud native. We needed a partner for our platform that could scale with us and who did not demand high initial investments in infrastructure or knowledge,” he says.

The search for a vendor with cloud infrastructure was short. Costa remembers that his team had prior experience with AWS and especially knowledge of all services it offered and that could support Kovi growth. “We went straight for AWS. At the time, other solutions lacked maturity. Also, the easy integration with the AWS solution is huge, that’s why we didn’t move forward with other vendors,” he explains.

Kovi developed its platform from the AWS structure, which today has four great interaction points with drivers. The first is the website, where clients can monitor their accounts and manage their profiles. There is also the Kovi App, which has support tools for the managing the drivers’ work, where they can register their expenses and gains.

The platform also has a full on-line registration process for drivers, which performs an automatic risk assessment based on an exclusive enterprise-developed score. “At the end of the process, we can guarantee that good drivers move forward in their registration and that they can access the vehicles,” he states.

The platform also has four other products that focus on Kovi collaborators: Kovi Rental, Kovi Fields, Kovi CX AND Kovi Data Warehouse. The first two control rental contracts, payments and fleet management (Rental), fleet movement and operational activities (Fields). Kovi CX, which began operating more recently, connects different support channels to real time information on the driver so to create a better experience.

“Finally, Kovi Data Warehouse is a data lake that concentrates all of the enterprise’s data, from all systems. We have over 2 billion data on our vehicles today. This volume allows us to foresee maintenance and churn for drivers, among other information and the entire enterprise is governed by this open data analytics,” reveals Costa.

Eight products work on the Kovi platform and count with AWS support services. The use of AWS Fargate, for example, guarantees zero maintenance. all services offered to clients are integrated by AWS Lambda. The payment system is based on AWS Elastic Beanstalk operating Elixir. The structure also has different databases - Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) and Amazon DynamoDB – for distinct functions, following the architecture below:

According to João Costa, the AWS infrastructure has allowed the Kovi platform to have a series of functionalities that are market differentials. One example would be using the IoT, with hardware that is installed in the cars and allows the enterprise to know if they are being secretive, or even if they need maintenance. “Today we have a series of safety alerts and the lowest vehicle-loss rate of the market,” he celebrates.

The solutions developed for the platform also allow vehicle maintenance to be controlled and assure the collection flow, which needs to be very fast. Driver get paid weekly, and the entire daily collection process takes less than 5 minutes. The platform is also updated with agility, allowing Kovi to detect if drivers have made their payment in no time at all. “Currently, most of our drivers pay their weekly dues via bank slip. This happens because, in addition to not having bank accounts, many of their rides are paid in cash,” he explains.

Costa also emphasizes three benefits obtained from using the AWS structure. The first is eliminating operational fees. “Everything we use is self-manageable and practically all services scale on their own. We can concentrate our engineering team’s energy to developing better technical solutions to solve our business problems,” he reminds, also pointing out that this eliminated the need for a maintenance team.

The second point is pricing “Today we have about 900 million AWS Lambda executions per month, with a cost of USD 1,5 mil. If we used physical servers, the cost would be much higher,” he compares.

The third point is the ease to access documents and support “For us, it’s incredible. The support team quickly responds. Communities that work with AWS are also very strong. All of this helps us see AWS as the right partner to ensure we are scaling, focusing on the business instead of the technology,” he emphasizes.

With a continuous growth in the platform, the Kovi team is now adding new functionalities. “What we want now is to work a lot more on platform automation. Reduce manual jobs and automate regulatory issues. We want to reduce our platform costs and bet on automation,” states Costa, remembering that the goal for 2021 is to have 20 thousand drivers on the platform.