For teams building social and community apps, speed is often the difference between learning early and falling behind.
Lokal understands this better than most. Over the past seven years, the company has launched more than 60 apps across 10 categories, reaching nearly 100 million downloads across its ecosystem.
Rather than betting everything on a single product, Lokal has optimized for fast iteration: launching, learning, and scaling what works.
That approach shaped a critical technical decision early on: don't reinvent real-time communication.
Buy it, integrate it deeply, and move faster.
Building for Scale Means Building for Reuse
Lokal builds products for users outside India's major metro areas, referred to as Bharat users. These users prefer simple interfaces, native languages, and apps that work reliably across a wide range of devices and network conditions.
To serve them, Lokal needed a communication layer that could be reused across many products and use cases without slowing teams down.
Today, Stream powers chat, video, and audio calling across a significant portion of Lokal's app portfolio, spanning multiple categories including agriculture consulting, astrology, and wellness.
Rather than treating communication as a feature to be rebuilt product by product, Lokal made it a shared platform capability, one that new apps could adopt quickly without re-engineering the fundamentals.
Speed to Market Was the Non-Negotiable
With dozens of products on the roadmap, Lokal's engineering and product teams had to be ruthless about focus.
Jani Pasha, Co-Founder and CEO of Lokal, says, "Speed matters a lot to us. One of the most important parameters is how quickly we can launch a product."
Building real-time calling and chat infrastructure in-house would have slowed everything else down. Instead, Lokal chose to buy infrastructure that was already proven—and invest their internal effort where it mattered most.
By using Stream, Lokal was able to:
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Launch new products faster
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Avoid long build and maintenance cycles
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Reuse the same real-time foundation across apps
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Keep engineering teams focused on differentiation
"We didn't want to reinvent the wheel—especially when it comes to voice and video calling."
This build-vs-buy decision allowed Lokal to scale product output without scaling complexity.
Video & Audio Quality, Proven in Production
For Lokal, video and voice were the most technically demanding parts of the product experience.
Serving users across diverse devices, geographies, and network conditions meant call quality had to remain stable even as usage scaled rapidly. Dropped frames, high latency, or inconsistent call quality would directly undermine trust in the product.
Stream's Video API runs on a global edge network designed to minimize latency and packet loss by routing users to the nearest available server.
By shortening the distance audio and video packets need to travel, Stream reduces jitter, improves call stability, and recovers faster from network disruptions, critical for maintaining quality across geographically distributed user bases.
Rather than experimenting with unproven infrastructure, Lokal chose a video platform already benchmarked at scale.
These benchmarks validated what Lokal needed in practice:
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Consistent call quality as concurrent usage increases
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Low-latency connections that feel responsive, even on variable networks
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Infrastructure that scales horizontally without degrading user experience
For Lokal's multi-app strategy, this meant video and audio could be integrated once and trusted everywhere.
As new apps launched and existing ones scaled, the underlying video experience remained consistent, without requiring teams to manually tune performance or rethink architecture.
By choosing infrastructure already proven across global traffic, high concurrency, and variable networks, Lokal reduced technical risk while ensuring video and audio calls could scale alongside its fastest-growing products.
Why Stream Became Core to Lokal's Stack
Lokal evaluated multiple providers before choosing Stream. The decision wasn't driven by features alone; it came down to how well Stream fit Lokal's velocity-first product culture.
Three factors stood out:
1. A Developer-Friendly Stack
Lokal builds with React Native to ship faster across Android and iOS. Stream's SDKs integrated cleanly into that stack, allowing teams to move quickly without architectural compromises.
"Stream was willing to listen to our tech stack and understand what we needed."
2. Fast, Collaborative Implementation
Stream enabled Lokal to test and deploy real-time features quickly, critical for a company launching multiple apps in parallel.
"That's one of the main reasons we integrated Stream quickly."
3. Top-Tier Developer Support
For Lokal, support wasn't a ticketing system; it was a relationship.
"The access we had to Stream's dev team was a very big plus."
Lokal worked directly with Stream engineers via Slack, iterating in real time and aligning closely on implementation details. That level of access made it easier to ship confidently and adapt quickly as products scaled.
What This Meant for Lokal's Developers
For Lokal's engineering teams, buying real-time infrastructure changed how they built products day to day.
Using Stream allowed teams to:
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Spin up chat or calling in new apps without re-architecting
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Share a consistent API and SDK surface across products
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Reduce time spent maintaining infrastructure
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Focus on product logic instead of low-level real-time concerns
Instead of every team solving the same problems repeatedly, Lokal centralized communication as a platform capability, making it easier for developers to ship, test, and iterate faster.
"When you're launching multiple products, you can't afford to slow down building things that already exist."
This approach scaled with the company, not against it.
Chat and Video as Product Enablers, Not Bottlenecks
Across Lokal's ecosystem, real-time communication plays different roles depending on the use case, but the underlying infrastructure stays consistent.
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Chat enables structured, persistent conversations in apps like agriculture and astrology, where written guidance and visual artifacts matter.
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Audio and video support higher-trust, more personal interactions in social and well-being contexts.
This modular approach allows Lokal to tailor user experiences without rebuilding core systems each time.
Stream acts as the connective tissue, powering different interaction models while keeping the developer experience consistent.
Moderation as Core Infrastructure, Not an Afterthought
For a company building social and consultation-based apps at scale, moderation isn’t optional. Whether users are talking to a friend, consulting an agronomist, or connecting with an astrologer, trust is central to the experience.
That means every conversation layer, chat, audio, and video, must be monitored and governed responsibly.
“Moderation is very core to what we are building.”
From early on, Lokal knew moderation couldn’t be bolted on later. It had to evolve alongside the communication stack.
Stream’s moderation capabilities played two important roles for Lokal:
- Providing a strong baseline model to detect harmful or inappropriate content
- Giving the team a framework to build on as they developed their own in-house moderation systems
“Your moderation model helped us benchmark. It was good too.”
Rather than relying on a single tool, Lokal adopted a hybrid approach. Stream’s AI moderation capabilities helped establish early standards and benchmarks, while Lokal built additional internal systems tailored to its specific use cases and regional nuances.
For voice-based products, moderation goes even deeper.
Audio conversations are recorded and reviewed as part of Lokal’s trust and safety workflow, ensuring that spoken interactions meet the same standards as written ones.
A Two-Way Growth Partnership
Lokal doesn't view Stream as a vendor; it views Stream as a partner.
As Lokal scaled its products to hundreds of millions of downloads, its real-world usage helped inform Stream's own product evolution. Edge cases surfaced earlier. New requirements emerged faster. Feedback was grounded in production reality.
"Stream has been a good partner for us so far."
This collaboration benefits both teams:
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Lokal gets infrastructure that evolves alongside its products
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Stream gains insight from one of the most demanding, high-scale app builders in emerging markets
It's a partnership built on shared incentives: ship faster, learn faster, and scale responsibly.
Looking Ahead
Lokal plans to continue launching new apps across categories, with real-time communication remaining a core part of its product strategy.
For teams building at scale, Lokal's story shows what's possible when you stop rebuilding solved problems and focus on shipping what matters—fast.
And for Stream, Lokal represents exactly the kind of customer that helps push the platform forward: high-scale, fast-moving, and deeply invested in building real products for real users.