Chalk, a data platform specializing in machine learning, has secured $10 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst, Unusual Ventures, and Xfund.
The funding will expedite the development of Chalk’s platform, expand its customer base, and bolster its engineering and go-to-market teams. Chalk’s platform, featuring a computation layer and LLM (large language models) toolchain, enables high-performing teams to orchestrate data for real-time decisions.
The critical components of Chalk’s data platform include a compute engine, LLM toolchain, feature store, integrated monitoring, and data science experimentation branches. Unlike incumbent technologies designed for large, long-running jobs, Chalk focuses on real-time machine learning, catering to sectors such as fintech, e-commerce, healthcare, and insurance.
The platform empowers developers to dynamically fetch data from APIs, microservices, and transactional databases, ensuring fresh and relevant data for real-time decisions.
Chalk is trusted by various teams, including Melio, Mission Lane, Pipe, Ramp, Vital, and Whatnot, to support their critical decisions. Ramp, a modern finance platform, uses Chalk to power core lending and fraud models, emphasizing its crucial role in expanding capabilities and enabling safe scaling. Vital, an AI-driven digital health company, relies on Chalk to power essential patient decisions in emergency room scenarios.
Co-Founders Andrew Moreland and Elliot Marx, who met at Stanford, bring a wealth of experience to Chalk. Their understanding of the challenges in machine learning workflows, gained from their roles at Palantir and Affirm, has driven the development of Chalk to provide a seamless and user-friendly experience for developers. Marc Freed-Finnegan, Chalk’s Co-Founder and CEO, brings valuable experience from launching Google Wallet and founding Index, acquired by Stripe.
Chalk’s latest funding round reflects confidence from long-term partners, including General Catalyst, which led their Series B at a previous company. The funding will support Chalk in reshaping the landscape of machine learning and data science, leveraging its modern data platform across various industries.