SAN FRANCISCO, May 28 (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 ( RUN ) 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.