Echo was built by a team with deep experience from Monzo, the UK's biggest fintech, where service-oriented systems and production-grade engineering are a given. When they started Echo, they weren’t just trying to launch something quickly, they were trying to build something that could scale fast without collapsing under its own weight.

In less than two years, Echo went from zero to being acquired by Coinbase for $375 million.

That kind of outcome demands more than speed. It requires building on a foundation that’s solid from day one.

The challenge: move fast without signing up for rewrites later

Like most early-stage teams, Echo needed to ship quickly, but they didn’t want to make early shortcuts that would turn into a rebuild later. The real risk wasn’t a slow start, it was ending up with an architecture and operational setup that couldn’t keep up once the product gained traction.

Instead of taking on the ongoing work of building and maintaining an internal platform (deploy pipelines, configs and secrets, observability, and debugging tooling), Echo wanted a way to move fast while still building on a solid foundation from day one.

Echo wanted to ship quickly, but they didn’t want a “prototype backend” that would become technical debt as they started to scale.

Why Encore: a Monzo-style service foundation in Go, instantly

Coming from Monzo, the team already knew the patterns that work when systems grow: clear service boundaries, strong structure, and operational visibility. They wanted to build in Go and follow the service-oriented approach they were used to, but without the overhead of assembling a platform team’s worth of infrastructure up front.

Encore Cloud gave Echo a path to start shipping immediately while still building something that looked and behaved like a production system from day one.

What stood out: Observability that helped Echo move faster with confidence

Echo’s team moved quickly, and Encore Cloud removed friction from the everyday workflow of iterating on a backend.

Instead of spending time building internal tooling just to test workflows or validate new ideas, the team could experiment directly in Encore Cloud's preview environments.

As the system evolved, Encore’s built-in tracing also made it easier to understand and debug behavior across services. Rather than bolt on observability later, Echo had visibility from the beginning, which helped them stay confident and maintain velocity as complexity increased.

Together, the Encore's tooling helped Echo keep moving fast, without the backend becoming a black box.

The result: a fast start that didn’t need to be undone

Echo built with Encore Cloud as their development platform from day one, deploying to their own cloud on AWS, so they could move quickly without compromising on the foundation they’d need as the product scaled.

For Echo, Encore Cloud delivered speed and structure at the same time, helping them focus on building the product while staying confident their foundation could keep up with the pace of growth.

About Echo

Echo built on Encore Cloud from day one, using Go and service-oriented patterns shaped by the team’s experience at Monzo. In under two years, Echo went from zero to being acquired by Coinbase for $375 million.