Fintech platform connecting regional banks to SMB growth services
Kokopelli operates Big Advance, a fintech platform where financial institutions collaborate to support small and mid-market business growth across Japan. The tech stack—PHP, Go, Java, Python layered on AWS with PostgreSQL and Redshift—reflects a mature, polyglot backend handling transaction and data workloads. Active projects signal heavy platform engineering work (microservices decomposition, reliability improvement, platformization), while pain points reveal a core tension: strong product-market fit within their bank partner network but friction scaling sales capacity and reaching SMBs directly.
Notable leadership hires: Tech Lead
Kokopelli is a 17-year-old fintech venture headquartered in Tokyo. Big Advance is their core platform, positioning regional and national financial institutions as distribution nodes for SMB support services—covering sales channels, hiring, operational efficiency, and succession planning. The company operates primarily in Japan with recent hiring activity in South Africa, suggesting early-stage geographic expansion. The engineering-heavy team (7 engineers, 2 sales) and active workload around microservices, reliability, and partner bank acquisition indicate Kokopelli is in a scaling phase, moving from a monolithic application toward a more modular, multi-tenant architecture.
PHP, Go, Java, Ruby, and Python on AWS infrastructure (ECS, RDS, ElastiCache, Redshift). Frontend uses Vue and Nuxt. Monitoring via Datadog and New Relic; infrastructure-as-code through Terraform and CloudFormation.
Microservices decomposition of their monolithic Big Advance platform, reliability improvements, global expansion, and acquisition of new financial institution partners. Also developing custom solutions for individual banks and consulting on digital transformation.
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