One of the major challenges faced by companies looking to leverage data to solve business problems is the lag between data arriving and actually being useful to an application. In other words, move from a database like Postgres to a data warehouse like Snowflake.
This is the problem that Artie, an early-stage startup born out of a husband-and-wife founding team, wants to solve. And today, the Summer 2023 Y Combinator alum announced a $3.3 million seed investment.
CEO Jacqueline Cheong launched the company in 2023 with her husband, CTO Robin Tang. “Under the hood, we use Change Data Capture (CDC) and stream processing, which means we use Kafka (open source data streaming software). That way we can improve performance.”Data are synchronized in a very reliable, non-intrusive and very efficient way,” Cheong told TechCrunch.
This approach means that latency is very low and customers can get their data to work faster. She says this also helps optimize her cost of computing, since it essentially only processes data that has changed.
The couple decided to start a company together to solve the problem of getting data from a database into a data storage repository with minimal effort. Before most companies can use their data, they need to clean it up and run ETL (extract, transform, load) to convert it into a usable format, all of which takes up valuable time. .
A common trade-off in data wrangling has been between speed and cost. If I wanted it cheaper it would have taken more time. If you want it faster, it will cost more. Cheong and Tang believe they have found a happy medium that makes things faster and cheaper. Their method allows customers to process small amounts of data rather than ingesting large amounts of data periodically throughout the day, increasing speed while reducing costs.
They launched the company early last year and had completed the first cloud version of their product by April. They started building a group of open source components. These components remain open source under the Elastic V2 license. “Essentially, what that means is that any company can use it.” [the open source pieces] Internally it hasn't changed and we have no intention of changing it, but the only thing that's restricted is basically that you can't use it to sell and commercialize products . ”
The company currently has 10 paying enterprise customers and four employees, including the two founders. She works out of a small office in San Francisco because Chung believes it fosters collaboration in early-stage companies and helps them separate work and home as a couple.
The $3.3 million seed round closed at the end of September, but was just announced today. It was led by Exponent Founders Capital with participation from General Catalyst, Y Combinator, and several industry angel investors.