Deepak Sarda Uses Astra DB to Fuel High-Growth Investing at Endowus
Deepak Sarda, CTO at Endowus
CTO at Endowus
Deepak Sarda is the Chief Technology Officer at Endowus, Asia’s leading digital wealth platform.
With over 20 years of experience in diverse domains including financial services, enterprise software, and cloud computing, Deepak leads the design, development, and operations of Endowus’ multi-award winning investment platform and the highly skilled technology team behind it.
Since joining Endowus, he has spearheaded numerous successful initiatives, including the incubation of Endowus’ first overseas tech office in India, delivery of a complex cloud migration, and transforming the tech org to a cross-functional structure. He plays a pivotal role in building and organising teams, systems, and processes that have enabled several business milestones including the launch of Endowus in Hong Kong.
Deepak joined Endowus from Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he was the Head of Developer Solutions Architecture for ASEAN, helping software developers build cloud native, scalable applications on AWS.
Prior to this, Deepak spent over a decade in the financial services industry, including at JPMorgan Chase & Co, where he was the Global Lead for Observability & Chaos Engineering Services within the Platform Services group, and at Citibank in the Equities Technology group. Deepak started his career researching machine learning algorithms at A*Star (BII), then moved on to developing middleware systems at computing industry pioneer Borland Software before joining a big data startup as its first employee.
Deepak holds a Bachelor of Technology in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and a Master of Science in High Performance Computing for Engineered Systems from the National University of Singapore.
Transcript
A key thing that Endowus is trying to do is to bring institutional style investing to everyone. I mean, that's literally in our name. Our name. Endowus actually stands for Endowment investing for all of us. We started in Singapore, and in Singapore we have come a long way.
We started, of course, from scratch as a startup and we have built our customer base over time to several thousands of users. And all of this operational data about investments, deposits, transactions, everything is all stored in Casandra.
Cassandra is an amazing technology. It allows you to scale your systems very easily. It provides very high reliability. And very high throughput, but Cassandra is also very difficult to manage. And when you run into issues, it's a bit hard to figure out what's going on.
So DataStax was, to us, the perfect partner in adopting Cassandra and using Cassandra at scale as a primary transactional database, because DataStax is composed of the best Cassandra experts you can find in the world. So the main piece that attracted us to Astra DB was the managed nature of Astra DB's offering.
It was a completely hands off operationally for us. We could rely on DataStax expertise to keep the database performant, to take care of very critical operations like compaction, which are necessary to ensure that Cassandra is running well at scale.
And so being able to offload all of this to DataStax was really important for us, because then we could go back and focus on building the business value for end hours. Astra DB has been able to scale with us every step of the way, and it's been able to scale with us both horizontally as well as vertically without having to incur any downtime.
The DataStax team has built Astra DB very well, where whenever we needed to scale up, whether that was vertically by adding more resources to the database, or horizontally by just adding more nodes to the Cassandra cluster, it was all managed seamlessly without any downtime.
So it's been very useful for us in our Singapore growth journey. The other way that DataStax has helped us scale is beyond Singapore. So a couple of years ago, we embarked in expanding our business to Hong Kong, and that required a whole new database setup because we decided to segregate the data stored in Singapore from the data stored for our clients in Hong Kong.
So we had to kind of come up with a second site, a second location to host all of our Hong Kong data. And again, the way DataStax managed services was there, it was very easy and quick to get up and running with a very reliable database for our Hong Kong region in no time.
And that really helped accelerate time to market in Hong Kong. One of the. Interesting things that we have done in the recent past is migrated from Astra DB which is the classic Cassandra database, to Astra DB serverless. Astra Serverless is actually quite a differentiated and unique offering in the market.
There's not many players that have a serverless Cassandra for our use cases for our needs. The way our technology, stack and business works, we found serverless to be extremely effective as a database technology. So this is one of the advice I would give to folks looking at DataStax, which is take a look at Astra serverless.
Astra serverless is actually pretty, pretty cool piece of technology. If you think about this last piece about educating clients and helping them navigate the universe of financial instruments and investing, this is where we see a lot of promise in GenAI.
GenAI really is something disruptive, where we feel that it can really elevate the client experience and help them achieve better investment outcomes by being better educated about their investment options. And so this is where we are actively investing in GenAI.
We started our GenAI journey in early 2023 and our first gen-powered support bot went live in the second half of 2023 and that's already achieving amazing results in production and we continue to invest more in a variety of use cases in GenAI, but all with the same vision which is how do we help our clients invest better to live better?