One of the big problems companies face as they try to use data to solve business problems has been the lag between the time the data comes in and when it’s actually useful for applications. In other words moving it from the database like Postgres into a data warehouse like Snowflake.
It’s a problem that Artie, an early-stage startup from a husband and wife founding team, wants to solve. And today the Summer 2023 Y Combinator grads announced a $3.3 million seed investment.
CEO Jacqueline Cheong launched the company with her husband CTO Robin Tang in 2023. “Under the hood, we use Change Data Capture (CDC) and stream processing — so we use Kafka (open source data streaming software) — and that way we can perform data syncs in a super reliable, non-intrusive and hyper efficient way,” Cheong told TechCrunch.
That approach means there is very low latency and that enables customers to put their data to work much faster. She says this also helps optimize compute costs because they essentially only work with the data that has changed.
The couple decided to launch a company together to solve a problem around getting data from the database to the data storage repository with a minimum of fuss. Most companies have to wrangle the data before they use it, performing ETL (extract, transform, load) to get the data into a form where you can use it — and all that takes valuable time.
The typical trade-off for data wrangling has been between speed and cost. If you wanted it cheaper, it took more time. If you wanted it faster, it cost more. Cheong and Tang believe that they have found a happy medium where they can process it faster and cheaper. Their method allows customers to process smaller amounts of data instead of ingesting bulk data regularly throughout the day, thereby increasing speed while lowering the cost.
They launched the company at the beginning of last year and had an initial cloud version of the product by April. They started building a group of open source components, which will remain open source under the Elastic V2 license. “So essentially, what that means is that any company can use [the open source pieces] internally, and we’re not going to change that, but the only thing that’s restricted is basically you can’t use that to sell and commercialize our product.”
Today, the company has 10 paying enterprise customers and four employees, including the two founders. They are working in a small office in San Francisco as Cheong believes it facilitates collaboration in the early-stage company, as well as creating separation between work and home for them as a couple.
The $3.3 million seed round closed at the end of September, but it is just being announced today. It was led by Exponent Founders Capital with participation from General Catalyst, Y Combinator and several industry angel investors.