12 Startups Using Elixir Language in Production - Elixir Use Cases

The annual results of Stack Overflow surveys prove that the popularity of the Elixir programming language is growing yearly. According to the latest data, Elixir ranks second among the most liked programming languages, and Phoenix has become the most loved framework.

But how does the use of Elixir in production look like compared to reality? What is its popularity among promising applications and modern startups? In our blog entries, we have repeatedly mentioned the use of Elixir in producing marketing tools and popular brands. Today I will look at promising startups that owe their backend to Elixir Lang.

What is a Startup?

Over time, many definitions of a startup have emerged. However, for this blog post, let's assume the version that a startup is a young innovative enterprise looking for a business model that would provide it with profitable growth.

The main features of entities that should be looked at when defining them as a startup are:

• the use of modern information and communication technologies,

• short period of activity,

• operation in high-risk conditions,

and, of course, the pursuit of rapid growth.

What is the difference between a company and a startup?

A startup is a company generally in the early phase and needs rapid scaling. The startup community is usually young, inventive, and collaborative, focusing on growth; corporations are typically established in the slow-moving, hierarchically structured concentration on productivity.

Top 12 Startups Based on Elixir

In this blog post, we take a look at ten great startups that use Elixir. The choice of technology has the most significant impact on software development. As each software has different requirements, different technologies are used. So take a look at the tech stack of promising startup companies!

Peek

Peek is a one-stop travel platform founded by Ruzwana Bashir and Oskar Brüning. Peek's idea focuses on experiences, offering amazing things to do. Sounds interesting, right?

With nearly $2 billion in attraction booking, Peek.com combines powerful Elixir-powered business software **with an award-winning market** where consumers can book fun things to do. And by interesting, I mean vineyard tours, water sports, skydiving and even the Hollywood Celebrity Homes Tour!

Peek Pro provides world-class online booking, point-of-sale, and hundreds of automation tools such as inventory management, dynamic pricing, layoffs, and marketing analysis.

With Peek, thousands of operators such as the Museum of Ice Cream, Artechouse, and Pennekamp State Park increased their revenues and automated operations with end-to-end technology.

Let's take a look at the statistics:

● Nearly $2B in experiences have been booked with Peek.com, and over 35M customers served

● Peek helps thousands of operators manage and grow their business by an average of 30%

● Over $100 million in investment from top technology, banking and travel investors and travel investors (WestCap, Goldman Sachs, Eric Schmidt, Jack Dorsey, Paul English)

● Peek has won several awards for innovation, including Newsweek Future of Travel 2021, World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer 2020, Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in Travel, Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award.

RD Station

I have already written about Elixir-based marketing tools, but such a tool will also appear on the list of promising startups using Elixir in production. Of course, I am talking about RD Station - a tool for creating online marketing campaigns.

RD Station is a leader in developing SaaS software for digital marketing and sales automation management. It allows you to attract potential customers and expand sales. This startup is a leader in Brazil, with 35,000 customers in 40 countries.

RD Station uses technologies such as Elixir, Python and Node in its tech stack.

Savi Solutions

Another example of a promising startup based on Elixir technology is Savi Solutions. It is a cloud-based platform that enables managers to discover and understand the results they achieve with data visualization and real-time reporting. Among other things, the platform analyzes the behaviour that causes these results through video and audio of transactions and events in the store. It enables you to replicate the behaviour that leads to profit and to eliminate behaviour that leads to loss, gaining new insight into customer experiences.

Processing a lot of data in real-time? This exactly is where Elixir is needed. Thanks to TaskBunny, a background processing application written in Elixir, Savi uses RabbitMQ as a messaging backend. 

Postmates [by Uber]

Postmates is a startup founded in 2011, but it could not be missing from our list. It is a mobile and web application that changed how local goods moved around the city, enabling anyone to deliver any product in less than an hour.

Available as a web and mobile application, Postmates has become the ideal system for distributing goods from any restaurant or store in the city, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Postmates uses many Elixir modules, including obtaining and releasing locks from Consul and other backends.

In July 2020, the two supply giants, Postmates and Uber Eats merged. Postmates officially joined Uber Eats and began accepting delivery and customer requests from the Uber app in June 2021.

Fresha

If you use the app to book Beauty and Wellness services, you may have already met Fresha. It is the largest and highest-rated platform globally, trusted by millions of consumers worldwide. Over 70,000 companies use Fresha, and over 300,000 professionals worldwide, processing over 20 million monthly meetings.

Fresha is headquartered in London, UK, with global offices in New York, Vancouver, Sydney, Dublin, Amsterdam, Dubai and Warsaw. So far, the company has raised $ 185 million in venture capital funds from leading institutional investors.

Fresha allows consumers to discover, book and pay for visits to local businesses with local businesses. On the other hand, beauty and wellness businesses and professionals use a comprehensive platform to manage their entire business with intuitive, accessible business software and financial technology solutions.

Sebastian Gębski, CTO at Fresha, comments on the decision to add Elixir & Phoenix to the application tech stack.

Another major decision was to adopt Elixir and Phoenix Framework - the DX (Developer eXperience) is pretty similar to what we know from RoR, but this tech is running on the top of rock-solid Erlang platform which is powering planet-scale telecom solutions for 20+ years. So we're getting pretty much the best from both worlds: minimum friction & smart conventions that eliminate the excessive boilerplate AND highly concurrent EVM (Erlang's Virtual Machine) that makes all the scalability problems vanish.

The transition was very smooth - none of Ruby developers we had decided to leave because of Elixir. What is more, we kept recruiting Ruby developers w/o any requirement regarding Elixir proficiency & we still were able to educate them internally in almost no time. Obviously Elixir comes with some more tools in the stack: Credo, Hex, AppSignal (required to properly monitor BEAM apps).

Plausible Analytics

An alternative to Google Analytics written in Elixir? Such a startup already exists on the market and is doing great!

Plausible Analytics is an open-source project that aims to make web analytics more privacy-friendly. The mission of this Elixir language-based startup is to reduce corporate governance by providing an alternative web analytics tool that does not come from the AdTech world.

In the Technology choices post on the Plausible blog, Uku Täht explains why he chose Elixir language & Phoenix framework as the leading technology in his project.

It is a fantastic language designed with so much care and attention to the details. Some might think of it as new and exiting language but for me this is a proven technology that one can rely on. - writes Uku in his post.

Axle

Another example of a startup using the Elixir language is Axle. Axle's mission is to help brokers simplify their operations and give them more time to do business.

This startup is a comprehensive financial services platform that has successfully established itself in the freight brokerage market. It enables freight brokers to simplify their financing operations and easily access the working capital they need to grow. In addition, axis automates invoicing, collection and payments - ultimately providing better customer service.

It's hard to believe that the startup was established in 2019, and its venture capital financing is already USD 39.2 million. The company saw the volume increase on its platform by 850%. This is definitely a startup worth emulating.

As for the technology stack, Shawn Vo, Axle's co-founder and CTO, explains precisely how the Elixir language helped Axle Payments hire the best software engineers and its impact on fast and efficient code production. You can listen to the entire podcast below.

Ulysse

Another company on the list of startups using Elixir is Ulysse. It is a platform established in 2018 that facilitates booking airline tickets.

Ulysse is a Paris-based startup that has revolutionized how we travel by plane. The cheapest tariffs, no advertising and real customer service make using Ulysse experience the comfort of travelling.

The startup uses Elixir & Phoenix to search for flights. Check how to do it here.

Goodsid.io

GoodsID is a startup based on blockchain technology, offering a solution for tracking valuable goods dedicated to luxury homes.

In addition to enabling customers to authenticate and secure goods easily, the platform offers innovative Customer Experience and CRM applications, as well as knowledge of the aftermarket of its products.

GoodsID is based on the JSON API using the Phoenix framework.

Dyad

Another startup worth looking at is Dyad. It is an innovative platform based on artificial semantic intelligence that provides services such as medical entity recognition and entity relationship extraction to standardize and contextualize large-scale healthcare data.

The startup supports the Codepilot product, also supported by the Elixir technology. Codepilot is an AI-assisted coding assistant that helps clinics correctly code patients. The platform saves the family doctor's time while increasing the income from the practice.

Bounce

Last but not least, the company I decided to describe here is a startup with total funding of $ 15.2 million. Bounce is a platform that offers luggage storage in nearly 8,000 locations. Sounds trivial, right? And yet, the startup ranks 138,807 among websites worldwide based on 638,134 visitors per month.

Elixir and Phoenix connect all Bounce systems on the backend.

Elixir Programming Language in Brief

Elixir is an innovative programming language developed by José Valim, a former Ruby on Rails collaborator. The Elixir is the best possible combination of productivity and scalability community. In addition, it has several advantages, making it an excellent option for startups.

Many people have recognized Elixir & Phoenix as the best community, which means technological support is available to all in need. Elixir was created to make it a fun environment for developers and give them agility, making it a great way to create an MVP for your idea quickly.

Main features of Elixir

It is built around functional programming with an immutable state in the form of an acting-oriented concurring approach and provides an elegant syntax. The machine uses the industrial-high-performance distributed Erlang VM.

Elixir has access to Erlang's concurrent tools and is a powerful, distributed programming language. If you are already programming with Ruby, Elixir syntax is easier to understand.

Elixir is a highly functional programming language. Functional programming is a programming paradigm where program functions have been treated as evaluations of mathematical functions without things such as a change in data. Unlike most mainstream programming languages like Java and Python, Elixir is categorised in modules (groups of functions) rather than objects and classes. Each data type will never be changed. Generally, calling functions in a variable produces a new variable instead of replacing the variable.

Elixir is a dynamic, functional language for building scalable and maintainable applications.

FAQ

What is the significance of Elixir in startup environments?

Elixir's functional programming and scalability are attractive for startups needing robust, concurrent applications.

How does Peek utilize Elixir and Phoenix in its operations?

Peek uses Elixir for its travel platform to offer experiences and manage bookings, benefiting from Elixir's scalability.

What role does Elixir play in RD Station's digital marketing services?

Elixir contributes to RD Station's performance in automating digital marketing and sales processes, showcasing Elixir's efficiency in handling data and workflows.

How does Savi Solutions leverage Elixir for data analysis?

Elixir supports Savi Solutions' real-time data analysis and visualization, demonstrating its capacity for handling large data volumes efficiently.

In what way has Postmates integrated Elixir into its service?

Postmates employs Elixir for backend modules to improve delivery services, showcasing Elixir's utility in high-demand, real-time applications.

What advantages does Fresha gain from using Elixir in its platform?

Fresha utilizes Elixir for its global beauty and wellness booking platform, benefiting from Elixir's fault tolerance and real-time processing capabilities.

How does Plausible Analytics benefit from adopting Elixir?

Plausible Analytics uses Elixir to provide a privacy-friendly web analytics service, capitalizing on Elixir's performance and scalability.

What makes Axle choose Elixir for its financial services platform?

Axle values Elixir for its ability to efficiently handle concurrent operations, enhancing financial transaction processing.

How does Ulysse improve its flight booking service with Elixir?

Ulysse utilizes Elixir for efficient flight search capabilities, demonstrating Elixir's effectiveness in time-sensitive and complex data operations.

What role does Elixir play in Bounce's luggage storage service?

Bounce leverages Elixir for backend operations, illustrating Elixir's suitability for logistics and customer service applications.