Chalk, the machine learning data platform, has just announced a successful seed funding round, securing $10 million in investment. The funding round was led by prominent investors, including General Catalyst, Unusual Ventures, and Xfund. Chalk’s platform is designed to empower world-class teams in orchestrating real-time data for decision-making, and this new capital injection will be instrumental in advancing its development, expanding its customer base, and growing its engineering and go-to-market teams.
Chalk’s data platform offers essential components for real-time machine learning, including a powerful compute engine, an LLM (Live Machine Learning) toolchain, a feature store, integrated monitoring, and data science experimentation capabilities. Unlike traditional technologies like Apache Spark and Databricks Runtime, which are geared towards large, long-running tasks, Chalk is tailored to meet the needs of industries such as fintech, e-commerce, healthcare, insurance, and other mission-critical applications that demand real-time decision-making with fresh data.
Existing tools in this space often present challenges for data teams, requiring them to extract pre-computed data from warehouses into production environments, leading to outdated insights and fragmented pipelines between training and inference. In contrast, Chalk empowers developers to dynamically access data from APIs, microservices, and transactional databases. Already, Chalk has gained the trust of industry leaders like Melio, Mission Lane, Pipe, Ramp, Vital, Whatnot, and many others to support their most critical decision-making processes.
Ramp, a modern finance platform, has chosen Chalk to bolster its core lending and fraud models. Ryan Delgado, who leads Ramp’s Data Platform, explained, “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 also selected Chalk to enhance critical patient decision-making. Vital’s CTO, Te Riu Warren, remarked, “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, originally met at Stanford and have been working together since. They each have extensive experience in the field of data platforms, having previously worked at companies like Palantir, Affirm, and Credit Karma. According to Marx, “We deeply understand the pain points and workflows that make machine learning challenging, and we’ve applied those lessons here at Chalk.” Moreland added, “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 + CEO, brings a wealth of experience to the table, having helped launch Google Wallet and founded Index, which Stripe acquired for its in-store payment solution, now known as Stripe Terminal. Chalk is fortunate to have long-term partners backing its vision, including Eric Schmidt and General Catalyst, who have supported the company since its Series A, and Unusual Ventures, which led their Seed round.
Max Rimpel, Partner at General Catalyst, expressed his enthusiasm for supporting Chalk, saying, “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 believe Chalk’s team is well-equipped to achieve this.”
In summary, Chalk is a data platform that empowers machine learning and generative AI, offering a seamless developer experience and streamlining data infrastructure. This seed funding round, led by General Catalyst, Unusual Ventures, and Xfund, will enable Chalk to further its mission of transforming the world of real-time decision-making through data. To learn more about Chalk, visit their website at www.chalk.ai.
About General Catalyst: General Catalyst is a venture capital firm dedicated to supporting positive, enduring change for entrepreneurs, investors, and society as a whole. With a long-term perspective, General Catalyst partners with visionary founders from the seed stage to growth and beyond, helping build companies that stand the test of time. The firm has played a pivotal role in the growth of industry-leading companies such as Airbnb, Deliveroo, Stripe, and many others. To learn more, visit www.generalcatalyst.com.