We are excited to announce our Seed investment in Chalk AI — an exciting new company building the future of infrastructure powering machine learning and generative AI applications. Chalk came out of stealth today to share its vision and early successes enabling world-class teams from companies like Ramp and Melio to orchestrate data for real-time decisions. We are thrilled to be partnering with Chalk’s founders and believe wholeheartedly in their mission. 

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Reinventing feature pipelines for real time use cases

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Real time data pipelines have started playing an increasingly important role for consumer-facing companies across many industries. However, legacy technologies like Spark that power them have reached a place in the maturity curve where they are painful and cumbersome for developers to use. Chalk is leveraging a proprietary compute layer and LLM tool chain to provide a simple, fast and modern solution for today’s leading engineering teams. 

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Chalk's best-in-class developer experience enables data teams to declare features and their dependencies with idiomatic Python in online, streaming, and batch environments. Chalk compiles these definitions into parallel pipelines that run on a Rust-based engine. These pipelines use the exact same source code to serve temporally-consistent training sets to data scientists and live feature values to models. This re-use ensures that feature values from online and offline contexts match and dramatically cuts development time. 

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With Chalk, engineers, data scientists, and analysts can focus on their unique products while Chalk seamlessly handles data infrastructure. We encourage ML developers to try Chalk out themselves! 

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About Chalk AI’s co-founders and leadership team

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We are grateful that this is our third time working with one of Chalk’s co-founders, Elliot Marx, and our second time with Andy Moreland. Most recently, we backed Elliot and Andy when they founded Haven Money, a company that was inspired by their experience building the machine learning infrastructure to stop transaction fraud at Affirm. Unusual is so excited to support Andy, Eliott, and successful repeat founder Marc Freed-Finnegan in their new venture.