Customer Story
How Canada's leading performance marketing platform consolidated legacy PHP systems and scaled to 3.2 million community members.
55Rush consolidated its legacy PHP systems onto Akka and tripled its managed communities from 3 to 9 — with a 240% increase in registrations, serving 3.2 million students, graduates, and parents across Canada’s largest virtual communities.
Akka ROI Scorecard
community growth — from 3 to 9 managed communities on a unified platform.
increase in registrations after consolidating legacy PHP systems onto Akka.
community members — students, graduates, and new parents across Canada.
Business outcome: world-class brands like CIBC, Amazon, and Unilever build audience connections through 55Rush.
55Rush brings together Canada’s largest virtual communities — over 3.2 million students, recent graduates, and new and expectant parents — creating custom campaigns that build audiences for brands like CIBC, H&R Block, Unilever, AIR MILES, Amazon, and Sun Life.
The firm’s rapid growth exposed the limitations of its legacy platform: multiple standalone systems built in PHP that couldn’t deliver the elasticity, reliability, and scalability needed to handle world-class brand workloads. After evaluating ZIO and Vert.x, the team chose Akka.
“Put simply, Akka has enabled us to build a world-class platform that will serve our needs for scale and performance for years to come,” says Ryan Sweeney, Director of IT. “Akka improves our performance, scalability, reliability, and simplicity in ways that no other platform has been able to match.”
Akka’s non-blocking, event-driven approach handles rapid spikes in campaign workloads — critical when major brands launch promotions that drive sudden traffic surges. Horizontal scalability across clusters means 55Rush can add capacity seamlessly as it onboards new communities and campaigns.
Speed to production. Consolidated multiple legacy PHP systems into a unified platform, tripling managed communities from 3 to 9.
Scale. 3.2 million community members served with the ability to handle rapid traffic spikes from major brand campaigns.
Cost to operate. Higher concurrency with simpler, cleaner code. Automatic failure recovery keeps systems running without manual intervention.
Business impact. 240% increase in registrations, with world-class brands building valuable audience connections through the platform.
Performance marketing campaigns are inherently agentic: each campaign needs autonomous audience targeting, engagement tracking, conversion optimization, and real-time budget allocation. On the Akka Agentic AI Platform, each campaign becomes a governed agent that monitors engagement metrics, adjusts targeting in real time, and optimizes conversion funnels autonomously.
These campaign agents can coordinate across 55Rush’s community portfolio, identifying cross-community opportunities, managing frequency caps, and ensuring brand safety — all with full auditability for advertiser reporting. Enterprises build on the Akka Agentic AI Platform directly, or have a system delivered and operated through Akka Specify.
