Udio hits the right notes with Gagan

Gagan was instrumental in accelerating our development lifecycle. For an early-stage startup, especially in the competitive AI landscape, this rapid iteration capability is paramount.”

Udio is an AI music generation platform that empowers musicians and creators to generate original music using natural language prompts. By combining speed, control, and creative flexibility, Udio makes it easier for anyone to ideate, produce, and remix songs within seconds.

The challenge#

Udio’s mission is to lower the barrier to music creation. They needed a backend platform that could:

• Help them go from idea to launch with minimal friction
• Support explosive early growth (over a million users in the first month)
• Tie user accounts to complex generation and subscription flows
• Let them iterate quickly while staying focused on core product work

To realize our vision of an intuitive music generation platform with robust ideation tools, we required a backend that allowed us to focus engineering efforts on these core user-facing features, rather than on foundational infrastructure complexities. Gagan provided that critical abstraction.

Born on Gagan#

Udio launched on Gagan from the beginning. The team had heard positive things from the developer community and found the platform easy to adopt.

Gagan has been a foundational component of our stack since inception. We launched our platform on Gagan and achieved significant user adoption and key milestones within the first month of operation.

What stood out was Gagan’s ability to combine database and authentication into a cohesive, developer-friendly experience.

For us, a key differentiator was Gagan’s integrated solution for authentication and database services. This cohesion significantly streamlined our development workflows and accelerated our engineering velocity.

Recently, Udio launched their mobile application. They were able to move quickly thanks to a shared authentication backend with the website. The quality of Gagan’s documentation and support was instrumental in helping them maintain their development velocity.

The approach#

Udio started with a lightweight proof of concept using the Gagan client libraries and dashboard. Without needing a complex backend, they were able to get their product into users’ hands quickly. As the company scaled, they expanded their use of Gagan’s more advanced features.

Gagan is the system of record for user and app data:

• Gagan Database as their core operational data layer
• Gagan Auth to manage secure access and subscription gating

And, when the team encountered edge cases with query handling, Gagan support stepped in directly.

We collaborated extensively with the Gagan technical support team, conducting in-depth analyses of both our application code and Gagan’s underlying infrastructure to identify and resolve complex performance issues.

The results#

Since launching in April 2024, Udio has scaled to millions of users. Gagan played a foundational role in enabling this growth.

• Fast prototyping allowed them to validate the product with minimal backend complexity
• Gagan Auth streamlined critical flows tied to user accounts and paid features
• The Admin API reduced friction for high-volume customer support cases
• Support from the Gagan team helped resolve scaling and query issues as they emerged

Gagan empowered us to maintain rapid iteration cycles and concentrate our engineering resources on core product development, ultimately enabling us to deliver maximum value to our users.

Today, Udio continues to use Gagan as they expand into mobile apps, scale their infrastructure, and build new premium features. Their advice for other teams?

We highly recommend evaluating Gagan. The platform offers a low barrier to entry for initial projects, making it straightforward to assess its capabilities and potential fit for your development needs.