Artie, a real-time data streaming platform, has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Dalton Caldwell at Standard Capital. The round also drew participation from Y Combinator, Pathlight Ventures, and several prominent angel investors, including Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox co-founder and former CTO), Benn Stancil (Mode CTO), Chris Best (Substack CEO), Charles Hearn (Alloy CTO), and Lenny Rachitsky (Lenny’s Podcast).

The funding comes as the company reports processing over 700 billion rows of data annually for customers including ClickUp, Substack, and Alloy. These companies use Artie’s platform to support AI and machine learning workloads, customer-facing analytics, and operational systems.

Fresh Data as a Competitive Requirement

As artificial intelligence moves from experimental projects into production environments, companies are hitting a common bottleneck: data freshness. AI systems that make decisions, trigger workflows, or interact with customers need up-to-date information to function reliably. Batch-based data processing, which updates information at scheduled intervals, no longer meets these requirements.

Building real-time data infrastructure in-house typically requires years of specialized engineering work. Artie offers an alternative. The platform delivers production-grade real-time data pipelines as a fully managed service, handling the complexity of streaming data between systems without requiring teams to build or maintain their own infrastructure.

“AI has pushed data out of dashboards and into live systems that make decisions, trigger workflows, and interact with customers,” said Jacqueline Cheong, co-founder and CEO of Artie. “In that world, data freshness becomes a requirement for correctness. We believe the next generation of data infrastructure will be streaming by default, with everything else built on top of that foundation. In a few years, the only companies that won’t be streaming-first will be the ones that haven’t fully embraced AI.”

Scaling Real-Time Operations Without the Overhead

Artie’s platform moves data across systems in real time—for example, streaming changes from Postgres directly into Snowflake. This allows teams to work with fresh, accurate data without managing the underlying streaming infrastructure themselves.

The platform handles technical challenges that typically require dedicated specialists: schema evolution across shards, end-to-end transactional integrity, failure recovery, and managing out-of-order or missing writes. By removing these operational burdens, Artie reduces risk and speeds up the path from experimentation to production deployment.

Michael Revelo, Director of Data Platform at ClickUp, explained the company’s experience: “We were hesitant to outsource mission-critical infrastructure. But after working with Artie, that concern disappeared. I believed in the team before I saw the product — and the product exceeded my expectations. It just works: it’s reliable, scales with us, and delivers near real-time data without adding operational risk.”

Building on a Streaming Foundation

Founded by Jacqueline Cheong, Artie started with a focus on making high-volume data replication simple and reliable. The company’s platform now powers use cases across fraud and risk monitoring, inventory visibility, customer-facing analytics, and AI workloads.

The Series A funding will support product development, go-to-market expansion, and team growth. Artie plans to extend its platform beyond transactional databases and analytical warehouses to support additional data systems, including event APIs, search platforms like Elasticsearch, and vector databases.

Backing from Operators and Investors

Standard Capital’s Dalton Caldwell led the round, bringing experience backing data infrastructure companies. Y Combinator, which previously backed Artie, participated alongside Pathlight Ventures and General Catalyst.

The angel investor group includes founders and executives with firsthand experience building data systems at scale. Arash Ferdowsi helped build Dropbox’s infrastructure as co-founder and CTO. Benn Stancil leads product and engineering at Mode, a data analytics platform. Chris Best runs Substack, which relies on Artie’s platform for its own operations.

“AI is only as good as its input data, and data that is out of date is not much different than incorrect data,” said Dalton Caldwell, Co-Founder & Partner at Standard Capital. “Artie’s real-time streaming technology makes real-time AI a reality in the enterprise.”

Origianl Creator: Ekaterina Pisareva
Original Link: https://justainews.com/companies/funding-news/real-time-data-platform-artie-scores-12m-from-yc-backers/
Originally Posted: Fri, 23 Jan 2026 08:06:46 +0000