The startup announced Wednesday (May 28) that it had raised $50 million in a Series A round, valuing the company at $500 million.

“This funding marks a huge milestone and a powerful validation of our vision for real-time AI infrastructure,” Marc Freed-Finnegan, Chalk’s co-founder/CEO, wrote on the company blog. “When we started Chalk, we knew real-time inference was critical for FinTech. Over the years, we’ve discovered that its importance extends far beyond FinTech — to identity verification, fraud prevention, healthcare and eCommerce.”

Chalk’s mission, he added, is to provide infrastructure designed explicitly for instantaneous, intelligent decisions, creating data infrastructure that integrates with developers’ tools.

“As applications involving large language models (LLMs) grow increasingly complex, our platform evolves to handle sophisticated data interactions more effectively,” Freed-Finnegan said. “This Series A funding significantly accelerates our ability to build a fully general compute framework, enhancing integration and usability, allowing developers to effortlessly create transformative real-time AI applications.”

The funding comes as businesses are spending more and more on AI, with PYMNTS Intelligence research projecting that enterprise spending on generative AI will increase by 50% by the end of the year.

“This isn’t throwing good money at a technology with eyes-closed and fingers crossed, hoping for the best,” PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote in a recent column about the industry.

“Our data show that 75% of companies are accelerating their adoption of GenAI and 78% have increased their investment in complex, enterprise-grade use cases. These C-level decision makers are redesigning core processes and infrastructure to leverage GenAI’s capabilities by making it a part of how they do business.

Surprisingly, her piece added, the biggest internal company advocates are the typically skeptical chief financial officers.

The research shows that 97% of CFOs trust GenAI to assist with risk management, and 98% trust it to help in strategic decision-making. These executives, the column added, are not using the technology to replace human judgment, but rather to augment it for better decision making.

“Perhaps the most powerful indicator of GenAI’s traction is the fact that the share of CFOs reporting negligible ROI dropped from 20% in March 2024 to 0% by December,” Webster wrote. “And it hasn’t budged since.”