Akka is a source-available toolkit and runtime simplifying the construction of concurrent and distributed applications on the JVM.

[4] By 2008 Scala was attracting attention for use in complex server applications, but concurrency was still typically achieved by creating threads that shared memory and synchronized when necessary using locks.

Aware of the difficulties with that approach and inspired by the Erlang programming language's library support for writing highly concurrent, event-driven applications, the Swedish programmer Jonas Bonér created Akka to bring similar capabilities to Scala and Java.

When Viktor became Director of Engineering at Lightbend in December 2012, Roland Kuhn became the technical lead for Akka.

The main part of the development is done by a core team employed at Lightbend,[10] supported by an active community.