Customer Story
How an AI revenue-optimization startup shipped a product-led growth platform in two months and scaled to dozens of paying customers — delivered and operated through Akka.
Coho AI built and launched its product-led revenue platform in two months instead of four to six, reaching market 75% faster than the alternatives it evaluated. A small team shipped a production system without managing infrastructure, then grew to dozens of paying customers and thousands of users within months.
Akka ROI Scorecard
faster to market. A four-to-six-month build became a two-month launch, with the production system delivered and operated for the team.
lower operating overhead. No infrastructure to provision, no boilerplate to maintain, and no dedicated operations hires to launch and run the platform.
growth in months — from launch to dozens of paying customers and thousands of users, on the same delivered system with no re-platforming.
Business outcome: dozens of paying customers acquired, two-month launch against a four-to-six-month estimate.
Coho AI set out to launch a product-led revenue-optimization platform with limited time and a small engineering team. The company planned to scale very quickly, which required a production-grade system, not a prototype.
Building that foundation the conventional way meant provisioning cloud infrastructure, writing operational boilerplate, and standing up the resilience and scaling machinery before any product work began. The internal estimate for that path was four to six months — time a startup competing for its first customers did not have.
Coho AI evaluated several platforms before choosing Akka to build and deploy services on Coho's AWS environment. The team started with a couple use cases, confirmed the platform solved their engineering problems, and began building — service by service.
"Speed and efficiency were our top priorities, and that's where Akka came into play," says Michael Ehrlich, Co-founder and CTO. "We quickly realized that the ease of use of Akka would enable us to be in production much faster than we had initially believed possible."
Coho was able to write business logic instead of infrastructure code — servers, load balancers, databases, security, and integration were abstracted away. Coho AI found Akka's documentation to be excellent and the team was very helpful with keeping the project moving without friction.
Speed to production. Time to market improved 75%. An initial build estimated at four to six months was delivered and in operations in only two months.
Scale. Coho AI grew from launch to dozens of paying customers and thousands of users within months, absorbing that growth on the same delivered system and AWS footprint. "Akka is truly almost a zero-maintenance platform," says Ehrlich. "As we grow, we can continue to focus on new features and enhancements. We don't need to actively think about how our infrastructure is going to scale."
Cost to operate. Operating overhead ran about 60% lower. With no infrastructure to provision and no operational boilerplate to maintain, the company launched and ran the platform without dedicated operations hires.
Business impact. Coho AI converted rapid launch momentum into paying customers in its first few months, which led to its next funding round. The project proved that Akka enables a small team to make huge impact.
Coho AI's platform decides how to grow revenue from each account, which is exactly the work agentic AI now does: an agent that analyzes user behavior in real time, identifies expansion and retention signals, and orchestrates the next personalized action — an in-product nudge, an upgrade offer, a monetization step. Through Akka Specify, that agent is specified as an outcome and delivered as a governed production system in weeks, fully operated, with durable state that survives failure and scale that holds as customers arrive.
The delivery path that put Coho AI in market in two months is the same path that builds and runs agentic AI today. Enterprises have a system delivered and operated through Akka Specify, or build directly on the Akka Agentic AI Platform. Both provide the production guarantees Coho AI launched on.
