We're excited to share that Chalk has been named to Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech 2025 list! The annual list spotlights emerging technologies with real potential to reshape industries over the next five years, from applied AI and infrastructure to sustainability and robotics.
Fast Company's editors selected 137 honorees across 31 categories, looking for projects that represent genuinely new ideas and hold serious potential for growth.
Their take on Chalk: we make "AI infrastructure a lighter lift."
The Chalk approach
Critical ML use cases, like identity verification and fraud detection, need fresh data in real-time to make accurate decisions. But the traditional approach forces a tradeoff: serve pre-computed data quickly (but stale) or fetch real-time data on-demand (fresh but slow).
Chalk solves this by computing features at inference time, pulling fresh data directly from sources without ETL jobs. It's engineered for performance, built for ease of use. For example, data scientists write features in their notebooks in Python, and Chalk compiles them to optimized C++ automatically.
Leading companies like Whatnot, MoneyLion and Socure rely on Chalk to power ML at scale. Earlier this year, we raised a $50 million Series A led by Felicis to continue building the future of real-time ML infrastructure.
Building forward
We're honored to be recognized alongside other teams like Runway, GitHub and Roblox tackling hard problems. Check out the complete Next Big Things in Tech 2025 list to see the full lineup.
Here's to making data infrastructure for AI and ML faster, fresher, and a whole lot easier to build!
