TL;DR:
- Chalk secures $10 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst, Unusual Ventures, and Xfund.
- Funding to accelerate Chalk’s data platform development for real-time machine learning.
- Chalk’s unique capabilities include a compute engine, LLM toolchain, feature store, integrated monitoring, and dynamic data access.
- Traditional technologies like Apache Spark fall short in providing real-time data solutions.
- Trusted by industry leaders like Ramp and Vital for critical decisions.
- Co-founders bring extensive experience from Palantir, Affirm, and Credit Karma.
- Marc Freed-Finnegan, Chalk’s CEO, brings a history of successful ventures.
- Investors, including General Catalyst, express strong support for Chalk’s potential.
Main AI News:
In a groundbreaking development, Chalk, the innovative data platform for machine learning, proudly announced today that it has successfully secured a substantial $10 million in seed funding. This impressive financial injection is led by a trio of renowned investors, namely General Catalyst, Unusual Ventures, and Xfund. The infusion of capital is poised to propel Chalk’s rapid platform development, broaden its customer base, and bolster its engineering and go-to-market teams.
Chalk’s robust data platform delivers essential building blocks for real-time machine learning, offering a sophisticated compute engine, an LLM toolchain, a feature store, integrated monitoring, and dedicated branches for data science experimentation. In a digital landscape where speed is paramount, traditional technologies such as Apache Spark and Databricks Runtime fall short, as they were primarily designed for large, long-running tasks rather than live data processing. However, industries like fintech, e-commerce, healthcare, insurance, and other mission-critical sectors demand real-time decision-making capabilities that rely on up-to-the-minute data.
Presently, existing tools present a cumbersome challenge, requiring data teams to laboriously extract pre-computed warehouse data into production pipelines, leading to outdated answers and disjointed workflows between training and inference. In stark contrast, Chalk empowers developers to dynamically fetch data from a variety of sources, including APIs, microservices, and transactional databases. Notably, Chalk has already garnered the trust of esteemed teams such as Melio, Mission Lane, Pipe, Ramp, Vital, Whatnot, and others, who depend on its capabilities to drive their most pivotal decisions.
For instance, Ramp, the ultimate platform for modern finance teams, has selected Chalk to fortify core lending and fraud models. Ryan Delgado, the leader of Ramp’s Data Platform, affirms Chalk’s vital role, stating, “Chalk has become a critical component of our Risk Intelligence Platform. It expanded Ramp’s capabilities with online machine learning and enabled us to scale safely by powering our transaction fraud model and credit underwriting process.”
Vital, a leading AI-driven digital health company, has similarly chosen Chalk to empower its critical patient-centric decisions. Vital CTO, Te Riu Warren, emphasizes the gravity of their decision, saying, “Emergency room decisions can mean life or death for patients. Chalk powers these most critical predictions for us. We evaluated a wide range of technical solutions, and Chalk stood out for having the very best developer experience at the most competitive cost.”
Chalk’s Co-Founders, Andrew Moreland and Elliot Marx, forged their partnership at Stanford and have been collaborating seamlessly ever since. Their journey led Moreland to Palantir, while Marx honed his skills at Affirm, where he played a pivotal role in building the early data platform that supported their buy-now-pay-later decisions. Their entrepreneurial spirit eventually led them to co-found Haven Money, a company subsequently acquired by Credit Karma to enhance its banking products. At Credit Karma, they found themselves reimagining a machine learning platform, further solidifying their expertise in the field.
Elliot Marx reflects on their journey, stating, “We deeply understand the pain points and workflows that make machine learning challenging, and we’ve applied those lessons here at Chalk.” Andrew Moreland adds, “Existing tools in this space have painful and cumbersome developer experiences. Instead of relying on dated technologies like Spark, we built Chalk from the ground up to provide a seamless experience our users love.”
Marc Freed-Finnegan, Chalk’s Co-Founder and CEO, boasts a rich history of successful ventures, having launched the first version of Google Wallet and co-founded Index, which Stripe later acquired and rebranded as Stripe Terminal. He expresses his gratitude for the unwavering support of long-term partners, emphasizing the significance of their contributions to Chalk’s journey.
Max Rimpel, a Partner at General Catalyst, weighs in on their decision to back Chalk, stating, “Backing Chalk was an easy decision for us. The opportunity to build a modern data platform that can be applied to many different industries is enormous, and we see the benefits of backing experienced founders—especially ones we’ve backed before. We share a common vision to reshape the landscape of machine learning and data science, and we believe Chalk’s team is well-equipped to achieve this. General Catalyst looks forward to supporting the team as they continue to grow.”
Conclusion:
Chalk’s recent $10 million seed funding round signifies a significant step forward in the real-time machine learning and AI market. With its unique data platform capabilities and backing from renowned investors, Chalk is well-positioned to address the growing demand for real-time decision-making across various industries, potentially reshaping the landscape of machine learning and data science applications.
