She spent years deciding which software companies were worth betting on. Then she quit to build one with her husband.
A profile of the founder turning real-time data into plumbing nobody has to think about.
For three years, Jacqueline Cheong's job was to be skeptical for a living. At the hedge fund Balyasny, she covered enterprise software - reading S-1s, pressure-testing growth stories, deciding which companies deserved the firm's money. It is a job built on saying no. So when her husband Robin Tang came home with an idea for a startup that would move data between databases in real time, her first instinct was the one she had been paid to have: doubt it.
She did what an analyst does. She went and checked. She called engineers around the Bay Area and asked a blunt question - is this actually a problem you have? The answer kept coming back yes. Companies were burning engineering cycles building and babysitting data pipelines, the unglamorous pipes that carry information from where it is created to where it gets used. Robin had felt the pain firsthand at Zendesk and Opendoor. Jacqueline had watched a dozen versions of it from the outside, in the financials of the companies she covered. The skeptic became the CEO.
That product is Artie. The pitch fits in one breath: it streams changes from a production database like Postgres straight into a warehouse like Snowflake in under sixty seconds, so the analytics and AI systems downstream are working with data that is minutes old instead of hours. Under the hood it leans on change data capture - reading the database's own log of changes - and Apache Kafka for stream processing. The result is meant to feel like infrastructure: reliable, quiet, and something a customer never has to maintain.
Under the hood, we use Change Data Capture and stream processing, so we use Kafka, and that way we can perform data syncs in a super reliable, non-intrusive and hyper efficient way.
Jacqueline Cheong, to TechCrunchThe customers are the kind that make the pitch credible. ClickUp, Substack, and Alloy run their data through Artie, and together the platform moves more than 700 billion rows a year - feeding machine learning workloads, customer-facing analytics, and the operational dashboards companies run their day on. For a four-person company that started in 2023, those are not toy numbers.
Nothing about the resume predicted a CDC streaming platform. Cheong studied applied mathematics at UC Berkeley. Her first stop was equity research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, where she spent three years learning to read companies from the outside in. Then Balyasny, where she sharpened the same skill into investment calls on enterprise software. By the time she co-founded Artie in 2023 and walked into Y Combinator's Summer batch, she had spent her whole career analyzing software businesses without building one. The technical half of the company is Robin's; the company-building and go-to-market is hers.
Joins Bank of America Merrill Lynch as an equity research associate and analyst.
Moves to the hedge fund Balyasny, covering enterprise software investments.
Co-founds Artie with Robin Tang; the pair join Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch.
Closes a $3.3M seed led by Exponent Founders Capital, with General Catalyst and YC.
Raises a $12M Series A led by Dalton Caldwell at Standard Capital.
Here is the detail that says the most about how Cheong runs Artie: the company landed its first enterprise customers without a single sales development rep. The CEO did the cold outreach herself. She taught herself the craft partly from Pete Kazanjy's Founding Sales, and treats a discovery call less like a pitch and more like the diligence she used to run on companies.
The goal of the discovery call is, do they have pain?
Jacqueline Cheong, on selling to engineersIt is a consultative style aimed at a famously sales-resistant audience - engineers who can smell a script. The same instinct that made her verify the market before she would commit to building Artie now sits at the front of the sales motion. She is still asking the analyst's question, just from the other side.
The January 2026 Series A came with a thesis attached. Dalton Caldwell led the round out of Standard Capital, with Y Combinator, Pathlight Ventures, and a bench of angels that reads like a who's-who of software operators - Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, ex-Mode's Benn Stancil, Substack's Chris Best, and Lenny Rachitsky. Their bet, and Cheong's, is that AI systems are only as good as the freshness of the data feeding them, and that stale data is the quiet failure mode nobody talks about.
The plan for the money is expansion beyond the original lane. Artie wants to move real-time data not just from transactional databases into analytical warehouses, but across event APIs, search systems like Elasticsearch, and vector databases - the new substrate of AI applications. The ambition is to make real-time the default setting rather than the heroic engineering project it usually is.
When Robin Tang and I started Artie, the idea was simple: make it easy to deploy real-time streaming pipelines.
Jacqueline Cheong