Startups

Artie helps companies put data to work faster with real-time syncing

Comment

Drawing of a cloud on a blue background with arrows going in and out of the cloud to show the syncing concept.
Image Credits: Khanchit Khirisutchalual / Getty Images

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.

More TechCrunch

Here’s what one insider said happened in the days leading up to the layoffs.

Tesla’s profitable Supercharger network is in limbo after Musk axed the entire team

StrictlyVC events deliver exclusive insider content from the Silicon Valley & Global VC scene while creating meaningful connections over cocktails and canapés with leading investors, entrepreneurs and executives. And TechCrunch…

Meesho, a leading e-commerce startup in India, has secured $275 million in a new funding round.

Meesho, an Indian social commerce platform with 150M transacting users, raises $275M

Some Indian government websites have allowed scammers to plant advertisements capable of redirecting visitors to online betting platforms. TechCrunch discovered around four dozen “gov.in” website links associated with Indian states,…

Scammers found planting online betting ads on Indian government websites

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

The deck included some redacted numbers, but there was still enough data to get a good picture.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Cloudsmith’s $15M Series A deck

The company is describing the event as “a chance to demo some ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates.”

OpenAI’s ChatGPT announcement: What we know so far

Unlike ChatGPT, Claude did not become a new App Store hit.

Anthropic’s Claude sees tepid reception on iOS compared with ChatGPT’s debut

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Look,…

Startups Weekly: Trouble in EV land and Peloton is circling the drain

Scarcely five months after its founding, hard tech startup Layup Parts has landed a $9 million round of financing led by Founders Fund to transform composites manufacturing. Lux Capital and Haystack…

Founders Fund leads financing of composites startup Layup Parts

AI startup Anthropic is changing its policies to allow minors to use its generative AI systems — in certain circumstances, at least.  Announced in a post on the company’s official…

Anthropic now lets kids use its AI tech — within limits

Zeekr’s market hype is noteworthy and may indicate that investors see value in the high-quality, low-price offerings of Chinese automakers.

The buzziest EV IPO of the year is a Chinese automaker

Venture capital has been hit hard by souring macroeconomic conditions over the past few years and it’s not yet clear how the market downturn affected VC fund performance. But recent…

VC fund performance is down sharply — but it may have already hit its lowest point

The person who claims to have 49 million Dell customer records told TechCrunch that he brute-forced an online company portal and scraped customer data, including physical addresses, directly from Dell’s…

Threat actor says he scraped 49M Dell customer addresses before the company found out

The social network has announced an updated version of its app that lets you offer feedback about its algorithmic feed so you can better customize it.

Bluesky now lets you personalize main Discover feed using new controls

Microsoft will launch its own mobile game store in July, the company announced at the Bloomberg Technology Summit on Thursday. Xbox president Sarah Bond shared that the company plans to…

Microsoft is launching its mobile game store in July

Smart ring maker Oura is launching two new features focused on heart health, the company announced on Friday. The first claims to help users get an idea of their cardiovascular…

Oura launches two new heart health features

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI considers allowing AI porn

Garena is quietly developing new India-themed games even though Free Fire, its biggest title, has still not made a comeback to the country.

Garena is quietly making India-themed games even as Free Fire’s relaunch remains doubtful

The U.S.’ NHTSA has opened a fourth investigation into the Fisker Ocean SUV, spurred by multiple claims of “inadvertent Automatic Emergency Braking.”

Fisker Ocean faces fourth federal safety probe

CoreWeave has formally opened an office in London that will serve as its European headquarters and home to two new data centers.

CoreWeave, a $19B AI compute provider, opens European HQ in London with plans for 2 UK data centers

The Series C funding, which brings its total raise to around $95 million, will go toward mass production of the startup’s inaugural products

AI chip startup DEEPX secures $80M Series C at a $529M valuation 

A dust-up between Evolve Bank & Trust, Mercury and Synapse has led TabaPay to abandon its acquisition plans of troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse.

Infighting among fintech players has caused TabaPay to ‘pull out’ from buying bankrupt Synapse

The problem is not the media, but the message.

Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting

The Twitter for Android client was “a demo app that Google had created and gave to us,” says Particle co-founder and ex-Twitter employee Sara Beykpour.

Google built some of the first social apps for Android, including Twitter and others

WhatsApp is updating its mobile apps for a fresh and more streamlined look, while also introducing a new “darker dark mode,” the company announced on Thursday. The messaging app says…

WhatsApp’s latest update streamlines navigation and adds a ‘darker dark mode’

Plinky lets you solve the problem of saving and organizing links from anywhere with a focus on simplicity and customization.

Plinky is an app for you to collect and organize links easily

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: How to watch

For cancer patients, medicines administered in clinical trials can help save or extend lives. But despite thousands of trials in the United States each year, only 3% to 5% of…

Triomics raises $15M Series A to automate cancer clinical trials matching

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Tap, tap.…

Tesla drives Luminar lidar sales and Motional pauses robotaxi plans