San Francisco has seen every version of data ambition, but Artie feels different because it grew out of scar tissue, not slides. Founded in January 2023, tucked into a fully in-person FiDi office, Artie was built by two people who have lived inside the consequences of bad data timing. Jacqueline Cheong and Robin Tang did not wake up one morning chasing a trend. They arrived here the long way, through markets, pipelines, and systems that broke at the exact moment someone important was watching.
Jacqueline Cheong, Co-Founder and CEO, came up through enterprise software equity research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, then ran full coverage across roughly twenty-five software companies at Balyasny Asset Management. Modeling, management meetings, channel checks, the whole pressure cooker. When you stare at software businesses long enough, you stop believing dashboards and start asking how the data actually moves. That instinct now runs Artie’s go-to market with a precision that shows up in traction, not taglines.
Robin Tang, Co-Founder and CTO, has been fighting the Change Data Capture battle since most people were still arguing batch versus real-time in theory. At twenty-two he built a large-scale ingestion pipeline at a startup acquired by Zendesk, then stayed to help lay CRM foundations and contribute to Maxwell, the open-source MySQL CDC tool that quietly spread everywhere. At Opendoor, he led infrastructure teams moving consumer growth data in real time. The pattern was obvious. Everyone was rebuilding the same fragile machinery, over and over.
Artie exists because that grind stopped making sense. The platform is fully managed, CDC first, and unapologetically focused on real-time movement from transactional databases into analytical warehouses. No sprawling ETL ambitions, no vague promises. Just sub-minute sync, automatic schema evolution, idempotent processing, and ACID guarantees that let teams sleep. Under the hood it is PostgreSQL WAL, Kafka, Debezium, and a custom typing library that doubles performance when scale stops being a rounding error.
The market responded fast. Within thirteen months, Artie had ten paying enterprise customers moving over thirty billion rows monthly. Two years in, that number has swollen to more than seven hundred billion rows annually, flowing for companies like ClickUp, Substack, Alloy, Keep, Wasserman, Tatango, Indigov, and Papaya Pay. These are not experiments. These are systems that fail loudly if they fail at all.
On January 22, 2026, Artie closed a twelve million dollar Series A led by Dalton Caldwell at Standard Capital, with continued backing from Y Combinator, Pathlight Ventures, General Catalyst, and a sharp angel bench that includes Arash Ferdowsi, Benn Stancil, Chris Best, Charles Hearn, and Lenny Rachitsky. Several of them are customers. That detail matters more than the headline.
The bet is simple and heavy. As artificial intelligence systems move from decks into production, stale data stops being an inconvenience and starts being a liability. Artie is building for that moment, expanding beyond warehouses into event APIs, search systems, and vector databases, where freshness is not a feature but a requirement. This is infrastructure that does not ask for attention, only trust, and trust is earned in rows moved, not words spoken.
