Yaigo by Yummy migrates to Azure and achieves an increase of more than 9,000 orders per minute

Yaigo's inception dates back to 2019 as a delivery services company established in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia, the country of its founders. However, as part of a strategy that sought to avoid a direct dispute with its competitors, the startup decided to start its operations in intermediate cities where they had no presence. To do this, it implemented an e-commerce and logistics solution with no coverage limits and with fully integrated digital components so it could design its entire digital ecosystem and build a more friendly product. With that, Yaigo was able to position its brand and grow its number of users. 

“After serving all the intermediate cities, we observed the need to bring the service to the main axis of Bolivia, especially to expand the coverage of our operation in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, La Paz, and Cochabamba," comments Erick Valverde, Director of Technology and co-founder of Yaigo.  

Security and availability with Azure

At the beginning of 2020, the growth that Yaigo achieved caused its server infrastructure to become insufficient and unable to scale, leading the company to look for cloud support alternatives. After an analysis of security, availability, and the cost-benefit ratio, it found in Azure the technical requirements and confidence needed to migrate. 

"It wasn't an easy decision; we needed to make a big investment and involve a technical resource that understood the Microsoft cloud. The migration was so natural that we were able to implement it in a record three months' time," explains Valverde, who also states that following Yaigo's migration to the Azure cloud, the company grew and recovered its investment that same year.

Services beyond delivery 

The company was established as a prepared food delivery service, which was its primary focus. However, social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic prompted Yaigo to create an ordering button that offered a different service to the user, who could add any other product to their order. This became the gateway for several establishments. The company then enabled Yaigo Play, a service that enabled the sale of streaming services and online gaming licenses for a market that had grown widely during lockdown.

By gaining a critical mass of users within its platform, it was able to add insurance payments, schools, and pet supplies to its services. It also added Yaigo Tickets, its QR-generation digital ticket sales service for sport shows or art events. Another differentiating factor is its digital supermarket with maximum delivery in 15 minutes within a 3 km radius.

Versatility and Azure-based customization

Yaigo's technology ecosystem benefited from having an in-house development team that gave it versatility to improve its products and services, always relying on Azure infrastructure. Plus, it was easier to customize its applications: Customer App, Driver App, and Merchant App.

The front end of the business is made with Visual Studio, .NET and .NET Core. The database engine is built on SQL Server. Yaigo uses a cluster where it has writing and query databases to offer a faster service, all mounted on Azure. In addition, it implements business intelligence through Power BI, thus being able to perform a better analysis of results through the visualization of data and reports that the solution provides.

Before and after

Prior to the migration, Yaigo only operated in Bolivia but on a limited basis with a maximum of 2,000 orders per minute because its infrastructure could not support a greater number of users concurrently. Today it claims to have more than 9,000 orders per minute, and, in addition, has managed to expand internationally with successful operations in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Paraguay. It can experiment in other markets and learn from the cultures of other countries as well.

Another noteworthy point is the configuration of automatic alerts, which provided greater peace of mind to Yaigo's IT team. If any of its servers are on track to exceed capacity, the IT team receives a preventive alert so they can act proactively, allowing them to better manage their time, especially during peak hours and on weekends.

"Before the migration, the IT team had to be constantly monitoring for any eventualities. Now they only take weekend shifts to support extremely isolated cases," underlines CTO Erick Valverde. "Azure prevented us from incurring an unnecessary expense of hiring a software architect or infrastructure expert. Microsoft's cloud already offers all the necessary tools."  

A future with more services and more expansion 

In November 2021, Yaigo was acquired by Yummy, a Venezuelan delivery company with operations in different countries in Latin America. This agreement represents one of the largest success stories in history for a Bolivian startup, and the most prominent one in the region.

Today, Yaigo by Yummy is the country's most downloaded Bolivian application, reaching a million active users, which is a fairly high number considering that Bolivia has 11 million inhabitants. However, it is not satisfied and continues to seek to expand solutions and services.  It continues to experiment across verticals, creating e-wallet services to facilitate the consumer payment experience, transportation services via Yaigo Ride, domestic ticketing services, and hospitality services. 

For the CTO, Yaigo by Yummy's goal remains that of its inception: "To grow at the product level, to innovate, and to turn the app into a competitive delivery super app, which allows us to enter the largest markets in the region," concludes Valverde.