The challenge
Fynnwell was building cross-border payment infrastructure for Canadian SMBs, but their MVP couldn't handle the transaction volumes their first enterprise clients needed. The founding team had built a working prototype, but it was running on a single EC2 instance with no failover, processing times were unpredictable under load, and two large prospects had made SOC 2 a hard requirement before signing. With $12M in Series A funding and a 4-person engineering team in Toronto, they needed to move fast without breaking what was already working.
Our solution
We embedded two senior engineers with the Fynnwell team for 12 weeks. In the first two weeks, we audited their existing architecture and designed a migration path that let them keep shipping features while we rebuilt the foundation underneath. We re-architected their payment processing pipeline on AWS using ECS Fargate with auto-scaling, moved their PostgreSQL database to RDS Multi-AZ with read replicas, and implemented an event-driven architecture with SQS for transaction processing. In parallel, we set up SOC 2 controls using Vanta, automated evidence collection, and prepared them for their Type I audit — all without pulling their engineers off product work.
The impact
“Kavora rebuilt our payment infrastructure while we kept shipping features. We went from a fragile prototype to processing 50K+ transactions a day — and closed our first enterprise deals within two months.”