Vulcan Ventures
Operating a mission-critical distributed platform since 2017.
Kraken is Vulcan's own high-scale SaaS platform. We run it in production every day to validate architectural decisions before applying them to client products.
- 8+ years in continuous production
- Hundreds of millions of transactions per month
- Tens of millions of emails processed per month
- Sustained concurrency from 20 to 500 TPS
- Sub-second latency under load
20-500 sustained
Sub-second
100M+ / month
Stable
Why Kraken exists
Kraken was not built as a demo or internal experiment. It was created to support real businesses operating under real constraints: high transaction volume, high outbound communication volume, unreliable connectivity, and zero tolerance for data loss.
Since 2017, Kraken has been running continuously in production, absorbing sustained transactional load, high concurrency, and strict data-integrity requirements without interruption.
Today, Kraken processes hundreds of millions of transactions per month and delivers tens of millions of system-generated emails monthly, making it a true large-scale operational platform.
Designed for sustained, real-world scale
Kraken operates under constant load. Scale is not seasonal or theoretical - it is part of daily operation.
The platform handles:
- High-frequency transactional workloads
- Large-scale outbound communication (email delivery)
- Concurrent access patterns with strict consistency requirements
This forced architectural decisions that favor predictability, correctness, and operational stability over short-term optimization.
When networks fail, systems shouldn't
Many Kraken deployments operate in environments where connectivity is intermittent or unstable. The system is designed so that operations continue even when the network does not.
This is achieved through a dedicated component designed specifically for this problem.
Production pressure reveals everything
Operating Kraken at this scale means dealing daily with:
- Traffic spikes
- Burst email campaigns and system notifications
- Partial outages and degraded network conditions
These pressures continuously validate - or invalidate - architectural assumptions.
Evolution timeline
2017-2024Initial production launch
Architectural refactor toward microservices
Verssion 2 government compliance, increased security and new functionalities
Remote Agent and sync engine maturity
Sustained hundreds of millions of monthly transactions
We live with our engineering decisions
Kraken directly influences how Vulcan works with clients.
Because we operate our own mission-critical SaaS:
- We understand the long-term cost of technical debt
- We design systems meant to survive years of change
- We prioritize maintainability over shortcuts
When clients hire Vulcan, they hire a team that already knows what happens after launch.
Technology choices
PostgreSQL
Chosen for strong consistency and transactional guarantees.
Remote Agent
Custom-built microservice handling offline operation, synchronization, and failover.
Containerized Services
Used for deployment consistency and operational control, without unnecessary orchestration overhead.
Flutter (Android & iOS)
Single codebase delivering consistent performance across mobile platforms.
Every component in Kraken exists because it solved a real production problem.
Kraken is not a product pitch. It is evidence.
It demonstrates Vulcan's ability to:
- Design systems for scale and failure
- Make explicit architectural trade-offs
- Operate and evolve software over long lifecycles
This experience directly shapes how we design client platforms that are expected to grow, communicate at scale, and remain operational for years.
Public record
Kraken has been publicly accessible under the kraken.bo domain since 2017.
View first public snapshot (Internet Archive)
Live system: https://kraken.bo (authentication required)
Talk to Vulcan about your product
Ready to plan for scale, resilience, and years of growth? Start with a senior team who has already lived it. Prefer email? Contact us here.