It’s an exciting day here at Chalk. We’re proud to announce we’ve raised $10 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst, Unusual Ventures, and Xfund to build the data platform for machine learning and generative AI.
When my co-founder Elliot graduated from Stanford, his first job was at Affirm where he was tasked with building a data platform to support their buy-now-pay-later decisions. It was immediately clear that existing tools had challenging and cumbersome developer experiences – and didn’t support real-time use cases. He experienced that again trying to leverage incumbent solutions at his startup with Andy, and yet again at Credit Karma after they were acquired. Each time he wound up building his own solutions.
Elliot sometimes jokes that building data infrastructure is the only thing he’s ever done (or knows how to do). Of course, that’s not quite true – but it is fair to say we’re intimately familiar with the painful workflows required to launch production-grade machine learning.
Instead of relying on dated technologies like Spark, we built Chalk from the ground up to provide a best-in-class experience for our users – the experience we’ve always dreamed of. Chalk makes it simple to integrate new features, backtest changes, and deliver real-time machine learning and generative AI.
Andy often says it best – Chalk's infrastructure is not just about powering decisions; it's about empowering developers. We deeply understand the pain points and workflows that make machine learning challenging, and Chalk was built to ease that pain.
We’re very proud of the product we launched last year, and it’s been thrilling to see companies making some of the world’s most complex decisions leverage Chalk.
Ramp, the ultimate platform for modern finance teams, selected Chalk to power core lending and fraud models –
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.
Ryan Delgado, Staff Software Engineer, Data Platform, Ramp
Other fintechs including Melio, Mission Lane, Pipe, and MoneyLion also leverage Chalk for critical use cases that require integrating the freshest possible data to make real-time decisions. Whatnot, the largest independent live shopping platform in the US, also uses Chalk as its machine learning feature platform to support recommendations, ranking, and fraud use cases for its buyers and sellers.
In the healthcare space, Vital, a leading AI-driven digital health company, depends on Chalk to route ambulances based on hospital wait times and diagnosis sepsis in critical cases.
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.
Te Riu Warren, CTO, Vital
We’re incredibly fortunate to be supported by an amazing group of customers, investors, colleagues, and friends. We’ve been given the rare chance to build on lessons from our previous companies and are excited about the road ahead.
Want to experience Chalk for yourself? Please reach out or get started now.
Also check out our interview with The Information!
P.S. - We’re always looking to add incredibly talented people to our team. We’d love to hear from you – please check out our open roles.