Blinkist reclaims engineering time to accelerate AI innovation

“Fivetran allows us to deliver actionable data and insights based on a trusted infrastructure faster and with fewer resources. This allows us to support strategic AI initiatives and deliver real business impact.”
— Sascha Urban, VP of Data at Blinkist

Blinkist is a global learning platform designed for busy people who want to grow. With over 38 million listeners and readers worldwide, it helps users unlock powerful ideas from more than 8,000 nonfiction books and podcasts in just 15 minutes. Its innovative signature format offers concise, personalized summaries and audio content tailored to each user's unique learning objectives, making high-impact knowledge accessible anytime, anywhere.

Supporting their work is Sascha Urban, Vice President of Data, who leads a multi-functional data team spanning engineering, analytics, and data science. His mission is to power Blinkist’s marketing, monetization, and AI personalization with industry-leading data infrastructure. By 8 a.m. every day, Urban provides the leadership team with the freshest insights for strong business decisions in a fast-paced market.

As Blinkist expanded its product offerings and adopted more features, its legacy data stack began to show its age. Pipelines couldn’t keep pace with growth, and manual fixes caused delays that reduced confidence in the data, highlighting the need for a modern foundation. The data team wanted to move beyond reactive maintenance and instead focus on proactive data-driven projects to enable smarter marketing, advanced analytics, and AI-powered experiences.

Rebuilding the data stack for speed, scale, and operational clarity

Blinkist’s rapid growth drove the need for modern, scalable infrastructure. But its existing setup — built on AWS and Matillion — struggled to support change at scale. It lacked version control and required production edits, creating operational risk and limiting agility.

The team adopted a new architecture built on Fivetran, Snowflake, and dbt. After evaluating open source tools, Fivetran emerged as the better alternative due to its low resource requirements, high uptime, fast response times, and automatic retry logic. For Urban, a fully managed solution meant faster delivery with enterprise-grade tools.

With Fivetran handling ingestion and dbt managing transformation, Blinkist gained a streamlined, more reliable data flow. The impact was immediate: data once delayed until late in the next business day now came before 8:00 a.m., enabling same-day campaign adjustments and more precise targeting.

Before Fivetran, Blinkist’s data team manually monitored failures and managed schedules, leading to heavy maintenance. Fivetran required minimal troubleshooting since launch, thanks to custom connectors, centralized scheduling, and auto-recovery. Now, Blinkist engineers spend far less time fixing pipelines and more time building value-generating insights.

‍

‍

“We chose Fivetran as part of a full architectural overhaul and saw immediate results. What used to take days now takes hours, and we no longer worry about edge case failures.”
— Sascha Urban, VP of Data at Blinkist

Freeing up engineers, boosting morale, and powering campaign performance

Urban estimates the shift from manual pipelines to Fivetran has saved his engineers up to 30% of their previously allocated time, freeing capacity for personalized product features grounded in consistent data. For example, the team was able to work on Blinkist’s recommendation engine, powered by Fivetran-ingested data, ensuring readers see the most relevant book summaries, learning paths, and content throughout their user experience.

Improved reliability also boosted morale and retention. Engineers can work on the projects they signed up for: building, experimenting, and innovating without the constant distraction of data delivery issues. Routine tasks that once consumed 10-20 hours weekly — like monitoring ingestion jobs or debugging API failures — now run quietly in the background thanks to Fivetran. 

Blinkist’s marketing teams also benefit from the updated infrastructure. With timely campaign data, they can iterate and adjust faster than ever, personalizing marketing experiences beyond first-party channels. Blinkist marketers test and refine strategies in near real-time, doubling down on what works without 48-hour waits. This tighter feedback loop supports ROI prediction, marketing mix modeling, and expansion into new channels. With Fivetran’s ease of use, analysts can also ingest spreadsheets or test new tools independently, speeding up experimentation and reducing dependencies on engineering.

Internal collaboration has improved as well. Having consistent and timely data means less back-and-forth between marketing and analytics teams. Finance and forecasting workflows have also become more dependable. With Fivetran-managed data, revenue reporting is faster and steadier, enabling better business decisions.

“Fivetran has completely changed how our teams work with data integration. It’s trusted, fast, and reliable. That reliability has removed friction, boosted adoption, and accelerated how quickly we go from asking a question to acting on the answer.”
— Sascha Urban, VP of Data at Blinkist

How AI-ready infrastructure powers faster marketing and faster decisions

With Fivetran automating data movement, Blinkist has reclaimed valuable engineering time to focus on strategic AI initiatives — from building full-stack applications to delivering partner-facing analytics. The team is moving faster without compromising accuracy, expanding its use of machine learning and predictive models across the business. 

 Internally, engineers are prototyping with AI; externally, they’re enhancing customer personalization and B2B reporting. Backed by a modern, reliable data stack, Blinkist is scaling as a more agile, AI-powered product organization.

“Fivetran saved us valuable data engineering time, which allowed us to embrace and adopt AI skill sets and innovate with AI. Our team is now more empowered to deliver more customer value with the same resources."
— Sascha Urban, VP of Data at Blinkist

[CTA_MODULE]