Pictured above: Chalk Co-founders Elliot Marx, Marc Freed-Finnegan and Andrew Moreland in San Francisco.

Chalk, a data infrastructure platform built for AI inference, announced a $50 million Series A funding round, bringing its valuation to $500 million. 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 as part of the investment.

The funding will be used to accelerate product development, expand the company’s customer base, and grow its engineering and go-to-market teams in San Francisco and New York.

As AI adoption continues to scale, much of the industry’s focus is shifting from training models to deploying them in production—known as inference. Chalk addresses a key challenge in this shift: enabling fast, fresh, and complex data pipelines to support real-time predictions.

“Chalk is poised to become the Databricks of the AI era,” said Aydin Senkut. “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.”

Chalk Co-Founder and CEO Marc Freed-Finnegan 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’s platform enables real-time AI decisioning by transforming how inference data is processed. While platforms like Databricks and Snowflake focus on training pipelines and feature stores offer low-latency access to pre-computed data, Chalk powers inference-time data computation with low latency and dynamic flexibility.

Chalk’s infrastructure is being used across industries including fintech, identity, healthcare, and e-commerce. Customers like Whatnot, Found, Medely, and Iwoca rely on it to serve predictions in milliseconds. It has become essential for real-time fraud prevention, instant loan decisions, and scalable content moderation.

“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.

The company’s Compute Engine lets developers write features in pure Python, which Chalk then compiles into high-performance pipelines using C++ and Rust. This removes the need for traditional ETL workflows, helping teams ship and iterate faster.

The platform also includes a native toolchain for working with large language models. Chalk’s LLM Toolchain unifies structured and unstructured data and offers vector storage, automated evaluation tools, and out-of-the-box support for major model providers.

“Chalk powers our LLM pipeline, turning complex inputs—HTML, URLs, screenshots—into structured, auditable features,” said Rahul Madduluri, CTO 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.”

The founding team—Marc Freed-Finnegan, Elliot Marx, and Andrew Moreland—met at Stanford and later worked on large-scale infrastructure problems at Affirm, Palantir, and Credit Karma. Freed-Finnegan also helped launch Google Wallet and co-founded Index, acquired by Stripe.

Throughout their careers, the founders saw a recurring need for low-latency, real-time data systems capable of powering intelligent applications. That vision now drives Chalk’s mission.

“We have a shared vision of the future,” Freed-Finnegan said. “And we’re building toward it—one millisecond at a time.”

Chalk is headquartered in San Francisco and was founded in 2022. The company has now raised more than $60 million to date.

Learn how AI Agents can supercharge your company’s profits and productivity at TMC’s AI Agent Event in Sept 29-30, 2025 in DC.

Aside from his role as CEO of TMC and chairman of ITEXPO #TECHSUPERSHOW Feb 10-12, 2026, Rich Tehrani is CEO of RT Advisors and a Registered Representative (investment banker) with and offering securities through Four Points Capital Partners LLC (Four Points) (Member FINRA/SIPC). He handles capital/debt raises as well as M&A. RT Advisors is not owned by Four Points.

The above is not an endorsement or recommendation to buy/sell any security or sector mentioned. No companies mentioned above are current or past clients of RT Advisors.

The views and opinions expressed above are those of the participants. While believed to be reliable, the information has not been independently verified for accuracy. Any broad, general statements made herein are provided for context only and should not be construed as exhaustive or universally applicable.

Portions of this article may have been developed with the assistance of artificial intelligence, which may have contributed to ideation, content generation, factual review, or editing.