Chalk AI vs Duckie

About

Chalk is a machine learning infrastructure company founded in 2021 by former Google and Stripe engineers, raising $26M to build a developer-friendly feature engineering platform. The platform allows data scientists and ML engineers to define features as Python functions that Chalk automatically computes, caches, and serves with millisecond latency for real-time model inference. Chalk handles the complexity of managing feature freshness across multiple data sources, computing features on-demand or through scheduled batch jobs, and maintaining consistency between training and serving environments. The company targets high-performance ML applications including fraud detection, credit decisioning, personalization, and real-time recommendation systems where feature latency directly impacts user experience and model effectiveness. Chalk's Python-native interface dramatically reduces the friction of building and maintaining real-time ML features compared to custom Flink or Spark streaming infrastructure. The company differentiates from Tecton and Feast through its emphasis on developer experience and the simplicity of its Python feature definition syntax that requires no distributed systems expertise to use.