By Anna Tong

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Artificial intelligence infrastructure startup Chalk said Wednesday it had raised a $50 million Series A funding round, valuing the company at $500 million. Felicis led the round.

San Francisco-based Chalk helps enterprises get their proprietary data into AI and machine learning models quickly, enabling companies to use AI to make up-to-date decisions. The company says fintech firms like MoneyLion use Chalk to enable instant decision-making for fraud detection and loan approvals, while solar company Sunrun uses Chalk to figure out where to put solar panels on a roof.

“The old school model would be for a company to process data in a batch process, but increasingly, companies want to make decisions in real-time,” said Chalk CEO Marc Freed-Finnegan. The company is co-founded by Elliot Marx and Andy Moreland.

Freed-Finnegan said Chalk competes with Databricks and Snowflake, data analytics platforms that help enterprises build and govern data and AI applications, but Chalk differentiates itself by enabling real-time data processing for AI.

Such companies have benefited from the AI boom by selling more tools that help clients build and deploy AI applications using the growing volume of data they already store with the company. Late last year, Databricks secured a record-breaking $10 billion in funding, one of the largest VC funding rounds in history. 

(Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Stephen Coates)