Chalk Raises $50M Series A, Valued at $500M: Revolutionizing Real-Time AI Infrastructure

Databricks competitor Chalk raises $50 million series A

SAN FRANCISCO, May 28 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence infrastructure startup Chalk said Wednesday it had raised a $50 million Series A funding round, valuing the company at $500 million. Felicis led the round. San Francisco-based Chalk helps enterprises get their proprietary data into AI and machine learning models quickly, enabling companies to use AI to make up-to-date decisions. The company says fintech firms like MoneyLion use Chalk to enable instant decision-making for fraud detection and loan approvals, while solar company Sunrun (RUN.O), opens new tab uses Chalk to figure out where to put solar panels on a roof. "The old school model would be for a company to process data in a batch process, but increasingly, companies want to make decisions in real-time," said Chalk CEO Marc Freed-Finnegan. The company is co-founded by Elliot Marx and Andy Moreland. Freed-Finnegan said Chalk competes with Databricks and Snowflake (SNOW.N), opens new tab, data analytics platforms that help enterprises build and govern data and AI applications, but Chalk differentiates itself by enabling real-time data processing for AI. Such companies have benefited from the AI boom by selling more tools that help clients build and deploy AI applications using the growing volume of data they already store with the company. Late last year, Databricks secured a record-breaking $10 billion in funding, one of the largest VC funding rounds in history. Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Stephen Coates Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Artificial IntelligenceSolar Anna Tong Thomson Reuters Anna Tong is a correspondent for Reuters based in San Francisco, where she reports on the technology industry. She joined Reuters in 2023 after working at the San Francisco Standard as a data editor. Tong previously worked at technology startups as a product manager and at Google where she worked in user insights and helped run a call center. Tong graduated from Harvard University.

Chalk Raises $50M Series A to Power AI Inference

Chalk powers real-time decisions for industry leaders Socure, Doppel, and Sunrun SAN FRANCISCO-(BUSINESS WIRE)-May 28, 2025- Chalk, the data platform for AI inference, announced today that it has raised a $50 million Series A at a $500 million valuation. The round was led by Felicis with participation from Triatomic Capital and existing investors General Catalyst, Unusual Ventures, and Xfund. Aydin Senkut, Founder and Managing Partner at Felicis, will join Chalk's board. The capital will be used to accelerate development of Chalk's platform, onboard new customers, and grow its engineering and go-to-market hubs in San Francisco and New York. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250528882026/en/ As AI adoption accelerates, compute is shifting from training to inference to improve predictions, transform customer experiences, and reduce costs. Existing solutions like Databricks and Snowflake solve training data pipelines, and feature stores provide low-latency access to pre-computed data. But these incumbents don't provide a solution for applications that require fresh data, with complex computation, at inference time. Chalk fills a critical gap in the market - inference data pipelines. Chalk's real-time data platform enables customers to make predictions with fresh data at inference time to prevent identity theft, issue instant loans, increase clean energy efficiency, and moderate harmful content. Senkut shared, "Chalk is poised to become the Databricks of the AI era. It's one of the fastest-growing data companies we've ever seen. The team has fundamentally redefined how data moves through the AI stack, a crucial advancement for chain-of-reasoning models. What's even more remarkable is Chalk's ability to deliver 5-millisecond data pipelines at massive scale - something that, until now, was considered out of reach. We couldn't be more excited to partner with Marc, Elliot, and Andy, who are all repeat technical founders passionate about building infrastructure that delivers an incredible developer experience." Marc Freed-Finnegan, Chalk Co-Founder and CEO, added, "We feel incredibly fortunate to have Aydin and Felicis as our partners for the next phase of our growth. We have a shared vision of the future, and we're honored to be part of the cohort of companies they have invested in." Chalk powers real-time ML across industries including fintech, identity, healthcare, and e-commerce. Companies like Whatnot, Found, Medely, and Iwoca use Chalk as a core infrastructure layer across their business. "Chalk helps us deliver financial products that are more responsive, more personalized, and more secure for millions of users. It's a direct line from infrastructure to impact," said Meng Xin Loh, Senior Technical Product Manager, MoneyLion. Chalk has become critical infrastructure for its customers by enabling teams to rapidly operationalize machine learning and AI. At its core, Chalk's Compute Engine empowers teams to write features in pure Python, automatically translating them into high-performance C++ and Rust pipelines to deliver real-time data without complex ETL. Additionally, Chalk's LLM Toolchain unifies structured and unstructured data, offering native vector storage, automated evaluations, and seamless integrations with major LLM providers. Rahul Madduluri, CTO at Doppel, said, "Chalk powers our LLM pipeline, turning complex inputs - HTML, URLs, screenshots - into structured, auditable features. It lets us serve lightweight heuristics up front and rich LLM reasoning deeper in the stack, so we detect threats others miss without compromising speed or precision." Chalk was co-founded by Freed-Finnegan, Elliot Marx, and Andrew Moreland - veterans of fintech and data infrastructure. After meeting at Stanford, Marx and Moreland solved large-scale data problems at Affirm and Palantir before co-founding Haven Money, acquired by Credit Karma. Before Chalk, Freed-Finnegan helped launch Google Wallet and started Index, acquired by Stripe (it's now called Stripe Terminal). Across these ventures, the team saw how real-time data pipelines enabled entirely new product categories and business models. Fast forward to today - real-time decisions at inference are essential for all modern applications, and Chalk makes that possible. About Chalk Chalk is the data platform for inference, providing critical infrastructure that empowers teams to rapidly operationalize machine learning and AI. The developer-friendly platform consists of a Compute Engine that automatically compiles features into high-performance Rust pipelines without complex ETL, and an LLM Toolchain that seamlessly unifies structured and unstructured data. Chalk powers real-time, low-latency machine learning for the world's leading companies, enabling instant loans, fraud prevention, personalized recommendations, and even clean energy optimization. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco, Chalk has raised over $60M from Felicis, General Catalyst, Triatomic Capital, Unusual Ventures, and Xfund. To learn more about Chalk, visit www.chalk.ai. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250528882026/en/

Chalk raises $50M at $500M valuation to empower AI inference - SiliconANGLE

The San Francisco-based company's service provides real-time data for artificial intelligence and machine learning models during inference, or runtime, allowing companies to allow AI to make accurate decisions with lower risk of hallucinations. The company says that its platform is essential as AI adoption continues at a breakneck pace as it helps to improve the quality of AI outputs, make them snappier and reduce the cost of deploying AI and machine learning models. "AI compute is shifting rapidly from training to real-time inference, creating new demands for fresh data and complex computations at the exact moment decisions are made," said Marc Freed-Finnegan, co-founder and chief executive of Chalk. Chalk positions itself as a competitor to existing data lake and data warehouse solutions such as Databricks Inc. and Snowflake Inc., which the company says solve the enormous data pipeline and feature store needs for AI model training data and pre-computed data. However, the company said these solutions aren't able to provide this data fast enough to be useful at inference time. "Chalk is poised to become the Databricks of the AI era," said Aydin Senkut, founder and managing partner at Felicis. "The team has fundamentally redefined how data moves through the AI stack, a crucial advancement for chain-of-reasoning models." A chain-of-reasoning model, also called chain-of-thought, is a type of AI model that will "think" and explain its reasoning process step-by-step before arriving at an answer. This approach allows an AI model to break down complex problems into smaller, logical steps, allowing it to mimic how humans solve problems by "thinking out loud." These models in particular require detailed, accurate and up-to-date data for the quick delivery of detailed answers. Chalk says that it can deliver data pipeline rates within 5 millisecond latency at massive scales. "Chalk helps us deliver financial products that are more responsive, more personalized, and more secure for millions of users. It's a direct line from infrastructure to impact," said Meng Xin Loh, senior technical product manager at MoneyLion Inc., a fintech company that offers financial products and services. For developers, the company's Compute Engine allows developers to write code in pure Python and automatically translate it into high-performance C++ and Rust pipelines to deliver complex real-time data for extraction and ingestion. Chalk also provides native vector storage, which is necessary for creating retrieval-augmented generation pipelines and knowledge graphs. These enable the creation of long-term memory for large language models and AI agents. The company's AI toolchain offers direct integrations with major LLM providers. Doppel, an AI-driven platform that protects users against social engineering attacks, uses Chalk's platform to detect, warn about and stop potential cybersecurity threats. Social engineering examples include emails or text messages that trick users into revealing passwords or other sensitive information. "Chalk powers our LLM pipeline, turning complex inputs -- HTML, URLs, screenshots -- into structured, auditable features," said Rahul Madduluri, chief technology officer at Doppel. "It lets us serve lightweight heuristics up front and rich LLM reasoning deeper in the stack, so we detect threats others miss without compromising speed or precision."

AI Firm Chalk Valued at $500 Million After Raising $50 Million | PYMNTS.com

Artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure firm Chalk is halfway to being a billion-dollar company. The startup announced Wednesday (May 28) that it had raised $50 million in a Series A round, valuing the company at $500 million. "This funding marks a huge milestone and a powerful validation of our vision for real-time AI infrastructure," Marc Freed-Finnegan, Chalk's co-founder/CEO, wrote on the company blog. "When we started Chalk, we knew real-time inference was critical for FinTech. Over the years, we've discovered that its importance extends far beyond FinTech -- to identity verification, fraud prevention, healthcare and eCommerce." Chalk's mission, he added, is to provide infrastructure designed explicitly for instantaneous, intelligent decisions, creating data infrastructure that integrates with developers' tools. "As applications involving large language models (LLMs) grow increasingly complex, our platform evolves to handle sophisticated data interactions more effectively," Freed-Finnegan said. "This Series A funding significantly accelerates our ability to build a fully general compute framework, enhancing integration and usability, allowing developers to effortlessly create transformative real-time AI applications." The funding comes as businesses are spending more and more on AI, with PYMNTS Intelligence research projecting that enterprise spending on generative AI will increase by 50% by the end of the year. "This isn't throwing good money at a technology with eyes-closed and fingers crossed, hoping for the best," PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote in a recent column about the industry. "Our data show that 75% of companies are accelerating their adoption of GenAI and 78% have increased their investment in complex, enterprise-grade use cases. These C-level decision makers are redesigning core processes and infrastructure to leverage GenAI's capabilities by making it a part of how they do business. Surprisingly, her piece added, the biggest internal company advocates are the typically skeptical chief financial officers. The research shows that 97% of CFOs trust GenAI to assist with risk management, and 98% trust it to help in strategic decision-making. These executives, the column added, are not using the technology to replace human judgment, but rather to augment it for better decision making. "Perhaps the most powerful indicator of GenAI's traction is the fact that the share of CFOs reporting negligible ROI dropped from 20% in March 2024 to 0% by December," Webster wrote. "And it hasn't budged since."