Robinhood, an alternative food delivery app, has chosen AWS as its preferred cloud provider to increase agility, innovation, and efficiency.
By leveraging AWS’s services, Robinhood is able to support thousands of restaurants, driver, and customers in Bangkok since launching in October 2020.
The mobile app was built in three months, and is the first in Thailand that does not levy application or gross profit fees on small food vendors – a sector that is severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
When a customer places an order for delivery on the Robinhood app, Robinhood pays the vendor the full price of the meal, helping 80,500 food vendors and 13,000 delivery riders across the capital to earn more.
Typically, in Thailand, food delivery apps charge restaurants a fee of up to 40% of each order – reducing the profit margin of most small street food vendors.
As part of Siam Commercial Bank’s (SCB) Corporate Social Responsibility initiative, Purple Ventures developed the Robinhood app to help street food stalls increase online deliveries and profits using the cloud.
Using containers
The application was developed using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), giving the company the flexibility to start, run, and scale Kubernetes container applications in the cloud.
In the case of Robinhood, the readily-available merchant, customer, rider, and transaction services were integrated as the container building blocks, which reduced app development time and cost.
Robinhood also uses Amazon Aurora MySQL to process up to 3,000 food orders per minute. Using AWS Batch, Robinhood easily and efficiently runs hundreds of thousands of batch computing jobs in the cloud, improving customer experience by quickly processing user requests.
In addition, using Amazon SageMaker, Robinhood delivers personalised restaurant recommendations to over 926,000 customers to help them quickly find the food they like.
“The restaurant industry continues to experience unprecedented difficulties. By developing Robinhood as a food delivery app that food stall owners can leverage, Purple Ventures is helping food stall vendors, which would normally rely on foot traffic, continue to sell during the pandemic, when customers are ordering meals online rather than walking to food stalls,” said Srihanath Lamsam, Managing Director, Purple Ventures.
“By not levying application or gross profit fees, Purple Ventures is making it affordable for food stall vendors to list their meal options on the app.”
“AWS enables us to cost-effectively scale our technology infrastructure as we grow, which supports our plans to onboard more delivery riders and restaurants in Bangkok and to expand to other cities to support even more small food vendors across the country.”
