Artie nabs $3.3M in seed funding for its real-time data replication platform

BIG DATA

Artie Technologies Inc., a new startup helping companies more quickly move data between their internal systems, today disclosed that it has raised a $3.3 million seed investment.

Exponent Founders Capital led the round. It was joined by General Catalyst, Y Combinator and a large group of angel investors.

A typical enterprise’s records are scattered across multiple database environments. To ease processing, developers often move those records to a cloud data platform such as Snowflake where they can be centrally analyzed. Artie provides an open-source platform that promises to speed up the information syncing process and reduce the associated costs.

The task of moving records from a company’s databases to its data warehouse is not a onetime activity. Rather, engineers perform the process on a regular basis whenever new information becomes available. Each newly added batch of records can take upwards of hours to sync to the data warehouse.

Artie, in contrast, says that its platform is capable of syncing information as often as every few seconds. The reason is that it sends new records to the data warehouse immediately after they arrive rather than waiting for a large batch of files to accumulate before syncing them. Under the hood, Artie uses the open-source Apache Kafka data streaming engine to move the information.

When a company regularly transfers records between two systems, it may occasionally send data that has already been synced before. Such unnecessary file movements incur additional hardware expenses. Artie’s platform uses a technique called change data capture to ensure only new records are sent to a data warehouse, which reduces infrastructure usage and thereby lowers costs.

“One common misconception about real-time streaming is its presumed higher cost compared to batch processing,” Artie Chief Executive Officer Jacqueline Cheong wrote in a blog post. “Our experience with customers tells a different story: not only do they benefit from real-time data, but they often also see a reduction in total cost of ownership. This is particularly true for companies with large volumes of data.”

Hardware outages can interrupt a file transfer workflow and potentially cause errors. According to Artie, its platform uses Kafka’s built-in reliability features to mitigate that risk. If an outage interrupts a data transfer, the software can automatically pick up where it left off.

Schema changes are another source of errors in replication workflows. A database’s schema is the manner in which it organizes the information it holds. A sales database, for example, might store each customer purchase log it ingests as a table spanning three rows. 

When a company moves records between two systems, the schema of those systems must often match to avoid technical errors. Artie’s replication platform includes a feature that can detect when the schema of the source system changes and modifies the target system accordingly. The result is a reduced risk of data transfer errors.

Artie was founded in early 2023 by Cheong and her husband Robin Tang, the company’s chief technology officer. The initial cloud version of the software maker’s replication platform launched last April. Today, Artie counts 10 paying enterprise customers and claims to be increasing its revenue with a month-over-month growth rate in the “mid double digits.”

Photo: Artie Technologies