Chalk has secured $10 million in seed funding to fuel advancements in machine learning and AI capabilities
Chalk, the data platform specializing in machine learning, announced today that it has secured $10 million in seed funding, led by General Catalyst, Unusual Ventures, and Xfund. Chalk’s computation layer and LLM toolchain empower top-tier teams to orchestrate data for real-time decision-making. The capital infusion will accelerate the development of Chalk’s platform, expand its customer base, and strengthen its engineering and go-to-market teams.
Chalk’s data platform offers essential components for real-time machine learning, including a compute engine, an LLM toolchain, a feature store, integrated monitoring, and data science experimentation branches. Traditional technologies like Apache Spark and Databricks Runtime are tailored for large, long-running jobs, not live traffic. However, industries such as fintech, e-commerce, healthcare, insurance, and others demand real-time decisions incorporating fresh data.
Existing tools pose challenges, as data teams must import pre-computed warehouse data into production, leading to outdated responses and fragmented pipelines between training and inference. In contrast, Chalk empowers developers to dynamically retrieve data from APIs, microservices, and transactional databases. Chalk is already trusted by esteemed teams such as Melio, Mission Lane, Pipe, Ramp, Vital, Whatnot, and others to drive their critical decisions.
Ramp, a premier platform for modern finance teams, chose Chalk to power core lending and fraud models. Ryan Delgado, who leads Ramp’s Data Platform, stated, “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.” Co-founders Andrew Moreland and Elliot Marx met at Stanford University and have since collaborated extensively. Following their time at Stanford, Moreland joined Palantir, while Marx worked at Affirm, where he developed the early data platform supporting buy-now-pay-later decisions. They later co-founded Haven Money, which Credit Karma acquired to enhance its banking products. At Credit Karma, they found themselves building a similar type of machine learning platform once again.
