Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) startup Chalk has raised $10 million in a Seed round, according to a note from the firm. The funding was led by General Catalyst, Unusual Ventures, and Xfund.
In a blog post, Unusual Ventures explained the qualities that compelled them to back the AI firm:
“Real-time data pipelines have started playing an increasingly important role for consumer-facing companies across many industries. However, legacy technologies like Spark that power them have reached a place in the maturity curve where they are painful and cumbersome for developers to use. Chalk is leveraging a proprietary compute layer and LLM tool chain to provide a simple, fast and modern solution for today’s leading engineering teams.
Chalk’s best-in-class developer experience enables data teams to declare features and their dependencies with idiomatic Python in online, streaming, and batch environments. Chalk compiles these definitions into parallel pipelines that run on a Rust-based engine. These pipelines use the exact same source code to serve temporally-consistent training sets to data scientists and live feature values to models. This re-use ensures that feature values from online and offline contexts match and dramatically cuts development time.”
Chalk adds that Spark and Databricks Runtime were designed for “large, long-running jobs, not live traffic.” But participants in industries like Fintech, e-commerce, and others, require real-time decision-making.
As legacy tools are not agile, Chalk saw an opportunity to provide an environment that allows developers to dynamically fetch data from APIs, microservices, and transactional databases.
Chalk is already working with other firms like Melio, Mission Lane, Pipe, Ramp, Vital, Whatnot, and more. Chalk says Ramp selected their service to power their lending and fraud models.
Chalk shares that co-founders Andrew Moreland and Elliot Marx have been working together since they met at Stanford. After Stanford, Moreland went to Palantir, and Marx worked at Affirm, two top Fintechs, where they worked on buy-now-pay-later decision models. They then started Haven Money, which Credit Karma acquired to power its banking products.
Marx says they understand the pain points that make machine learning difficult, and they are solving those hurdles at Chalk.
“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,” says Moreland.
Chalk’s Co-Founder and CEO Marc Freed-Finnegan worked on the first version of Google Wallet and started Index, which Stripe acquired as its in-store payment solution– which has morphed into Stripe Terminal.
Max Rimpel, Partner at General Catalyst, called the decision to back Chalk easy.
“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 believe Chalk’s team is well-equipped to achieve this. General Catalyst looks forward to supporting the team as they continue to grow.”
