Backend and Frontend Support for a German Private Equity Investing Platform

Moonfare, a Berlin-based FinTech startup is building a technology platform that allows individual investors to invest in top-tier funds with low minimums (starting at €50,000). Netguru supported the client in building the new platform with Node.js on the backend and React on the frontend. The platform was built to use Amazon Web Services.

Moonfare, a Berlin-based FinTech startup, believes individual investors should also be able to invest in Private Equity funds.

The company is building a technology platform that allows individual investors to invest in top-tier funds with low minimums (starting at €50,000).

Having launched in January 2018, Moonfare has had an impressive start.
Moonfare manages funds across Germany, the UK and Switzerland, and is working with some of the world’s leading private equity funds such as Warburg Pincus, The Carlyle Group, and EQT.

The Moonfare team turned to Netguru as a trustworthy technology partner. Netguru took on the challenge of creating a product that would command trust, fulfil strict security standards, and provide an amazing user experience. The team, made up of three developers, a Project Manager, a QA engineer, and a Product Designer, started working on the project at the end of 2017.

After an analysis of the codebase and Moonfare’s business goals, Netguru recommended to build the new platform with Node.js on the backend and React on the frontend. The platform was built to use Amazon Web Services.

Scalability

AWS offers plenty of tools that have great support for Node.js. With AWS, providing the Moonfare app with sufficient resources is a matter of minutes. The app can even be configured to self-scale within defined limits. Moonfare has taken advantage of the AWS-Node.js combination and is now able to easily handle any number of requests and pay according to their actual usage.

One of the AWS tools used in the project is the serverless Lambda function. Moonfare only pays micropayments for the requests that have been handled and not for maintaining the whole server. The cost? The first million requests in a month is totally free of charge and, once the limit has been exceeded, the company is charged $0.20 per every next million requests.

Performance

The Moonfare platform mostly does Create, Read, Update and Delete operations. It does not use any real-time solutions where Node.js shines the most. For this reason, it does not use the full potential of Node.js in terms of performance.

React.js on the frontend

React.js proved to be very efficient in development. Our developers work with ready components that are easy to test and document. The components also make it simple to divide tasks between developers – programmers can work on separate components at the same time. Finally, React.js comes with a rich ecosystem of tools that make development much quicker and more efficient than it would be with other solutions.

Results

The team released the first version of the product after 3 months of development and in August 2018, Moonfare successfully kicked off with its platform to the market. The commercial launch of a Berlin-based fintech startup was covered by the media, including a feature in the global edition of the business daily Handelsblatt. Moonfare is satisfied with the cooperation with Netguru and they treat the external team as a part of the Moonfare family. The startup is working with industry leaders such as The Carlyle Group, Warburg Pincus, and EQT.

If you want to learn more about our cooperation with Moonfare, check out the interview with Gerardo Bonilla, Product Manager at Moonfare.