Customer Story
International calling provider scaled affordable communications and payments across 400+ cities on Akka.
Esdiac rebuilt its distributed communications and payments network on Akka and cut infrastructure costs by 65% while serving orders of magnitude more users. An architecture that stalled at 5,000 customers now carries tens of thousands of business and consumer users placing international calls across more than 400 cities worldwide.
Akka ROI Scorecard
faster delivery of new calling and payment features, with routing and pricing changes shipped in days instead of weeks.
lower infrastructure cost, serving the same and growing call volume on a fraction of the previous footprint.
the user base and beyond — from a 5,000-customer ceiling to tens of thousands of users across 400+ cities, with room to grow.
Business outcome: affordable international calling reaching diaspora and global users in regions with limited digital infrastructure.
Esdiac set out to lower the cost of international calling for the African diaspora and the wider global community, targeting users in regions with limited digital infrastructure. Delivering that meant running a distributed communications network and a payment system reliably across many countries, at a price point far below international roaming.
The initial architecture could not carry the load. It stalled at roughly 5,000 customers, well short of demand. Every additional user added infrastructure cost, and the platform had no headroom to expand into new cities without a proportional increase in spend.
Their proposed rewrite would handle more calls but required significant hands-on time to manage. The team needed a platform that could scale, extend quickly as market needs changed, run many services in parallel, and do it all at substantially lower cost. The Akka Platform proved it would address the steep challenge.
This is the Never Fail guarantee: Akka handles clustering, resilience, durable in-memory state, and traffic steering, so the application does not have to. Failed components and processes recover automatically, which is critical for a real-time calling and payments service.
Scale. Esdiac broke past its 5,000-customer ceiling to serve tens of thousands of business and consumer users, orders of magnitude more than the original architecture supported. The platform now spans 400+ cities globally, with unlimited room to grow.
Cost to operate. Infrastructure costs fell 65%. Esdiac carries a far larger user base on a smaller footprint, decoupling growth from spend.
Speed to production. New calling and payment features, routing rules, and pricing changes ship in days rather than weeks, letting Esdiac open new markets faster.
Business impact. Bassirou Rabo, CTE at Esdiac, attributes the platform's strength and reliability to Akka as a foundation for scalable growth.
Esdiac's service — real-time international calling and prepaid payments across 400+ cities — is exactly where agentic AI now operates. On the Akka Agentic AI Platform, an AI agent can take a spoken or chat request to place a call, run least-cost routing across regions in real time, verify prepaid balance and eligibility, screen top-ups for fraud, and recommend the cheapest rate plan for each destination — all at the scale Esdiac already proved, with durable state that survives failure and sub-minute recovery.
The platform that scaled Esdiac's communications network is the same platform that builds and runs agentic AI today. Providers build on the Akka Agentic AI Platform directly, or have a system delivered and operated through Akka Specify. Both provide the production guarantees Esdiac has run on.
