FirstHive fuses data and AI to power real-time marketing at scale

FirstHive is an AI-powered customer data platform that helps enterprises unify fragmented data and deliver personalized, automated marketing at scale. Built on AWS, the platform supports real-time data processing and scalability, and features embedded AI and gen AI capabilities, enabling the team to launch new features quickly and handle complex workloads with ease.

This foundation has allowed FirstHive to serve enterprise customers, process billions of customer events, autoscale in milliseconds, and run on hundreds of servers, all managed by a lean engineering team.

Solving the data disconnect

Enterprises today face a familiar challenge: customer data is fragmented across CRMs, mobile apps, websites, and offline systems. This fragmentation makes it difficult for marketing teams to deliver consistent, personalized experiences. FirstHive’s platform enables customers to solve this challenge by unifying data from diverse sources.

“A lot of brands know they have valuable customer data,” says Anshul Agarwal, Head of Product Engineering at FirstHive. “But when that data is scattered across systems like CRM tools, analytics platforms, and point-of-sale software, they can’t stitch it together or act on it. That’s where we come in.”

FirstHive is supporting organizations in a diverse range of industries, including aviation, banking, financial services, insurance, real estate, and media. Its platform provides a 360-degree view of the customer across every channel and automates processes such as renewal journeys and tailored product recommendations. This allows brands to engage with customers at the right time and achieve measurable ROI.

A strategic foundation from day one

Having a robust foundation infrastructure was critical for FirstHive. “When we first started building the product, we needed a cloud provider who could give us a reliable infrastructure,” says Agarwal. “We found AWS to be the best in terms of providing new services ahead of the curve.”

FirstHive built its platform from the ground up on AWS, enabling it to deliver the scale, flexibility, and innovation required to support its customers. That decision enabled the startup to evolve its architecture over time, moving from monoliths to microservices and now to serverless, all while maintaining performance and cost efficiency.

Billions of events, zero bottlenecks

FirstHive’s collaboration with AWS has powered real operational scale. What began with a few servers and clients has grown into a platform that now supports leading enterprise customers, and runs on hundreds of servers. “Now we’re handling billions of events, and the same team is managing everything, thanks to automation and AWS scalability.” says Agarwal.

This is supported by AWS Lambda which allows FirstHive to instantly scale without provisioning infrastructure. “AWS Lambda helped us auto-scale in milliseconds. We didn’t have to worry about the backend, and just focused on building the feature,” Agarwal added.

Intelligence at every layer

FirstHive’s technology stack also enables near real-time, AI-powered experiences across the platform. It leverages Amazon Redshift for data analytics, Amazon Simple Storage Service to store vast amounts of customer data cost-efficiently, and Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Bedrock to support advanced machine learning and gen AI features.

Serverless compute needs are served through AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda, while different workloads use Amazon DocumentDB or Amazon DynamoDB based on performance requirements. “Using these AWS services, FirstHive is able to solve complex business problems and provide a reliable, scalable infrastructure in a very cost-efficient manner,” says Agarwal.

Proving impact in just six months

Enterprises deploying the platform on AWS have seen double-digit ROI improvements within six months. In one case, a customer recorded a 20 percent increase in end-customer engagement after adopting FirstHive.

By embedding gen AI directly into the platform, including capabilities like dynamic segmentation, predictive recommendations, and journey optimization, FirstHive is helping marketers shift from reactive to proactive engagement. These gen AI features are live, tested, and already driving results.

Reliability that lets innovation thrive

As well as introducing new technologies, the collaboration also delivered something less tangible but hugely valuable: peace of mind. “AWS is the friend who lets me sleep in peace,” says Agarwal. “I know there’s a team working in the background to keep everything running, and that lets us focus on building what matters.”

With AWS as its foundation, FirstHive has created a platform that helps marketers move faster, engage smarter, and scale without limits.

FirstHive is the among the 350,000 startups that have joined AWS Activate since its inception in 2013. The program is open to founders from across the world seeking to scale their businesses, try new tools, and connect and learn from the AWS community. Membership is free and unlocks a range of benefits and resources to enable cost-effective growth. Founders can apply for up to US $100,000 in AWS credits which can be used for AWS services and support, from core infrastructure to emerging technologies. Join AWS Activate and find out how you can unlock the tools you need to grow.