Complex infrastructure shouldn’t slow teams down. We’re building a simpler way to move data in real time.
Hi, I’m Robin, Co-Founder and CTO of Artie. At 22, I built my first large-scale ingestion pipeline while working at a startup in San Francisco. We processed billions of events daily and had to keep everything lean to save time and money – a challenge that shaped my approach to data pipelines.
After the startup was acquired by Zendesk, I helped lay the foundation for their CRM offering. We relied heavily on Change Data Capture (CDC) and Kafka, which became integral to Zendesk’s architecture. Zendesk invested in CDC and created Maxwell, an open-source CDC tool for MySQL binlogs, now widely used across the industry.
At a real estate tech startup, I saw firsthand how delays in data ingestion and processing errors hindered productivity. These inefficiencies didn’t just frustrate us – it was clear they were driving up operational costs and holding us back from creating truly powerful data products. That’s when it hit me: unreliable pipelines weren’t just an annoyance; they were a bottleneck for innovation.
Determined to tackle these challenges, I set out to build my own CDC-based data replication solution. The MVP turned out to be a game-changer, but it quickly exposed the real complexity that every company wrestles with – maintaining consistency, adapting to schema changes, supporting diverse data types, managing stateful datasets, and so much more.
To turn this vision into reality, I teamed up with Jacqueline, my Co-Founder, who took charge of company building and go-to-market strategy while I focused on the product. Together, we joined Y Combinator, onboarded dozens of customers, and received the support of world-class investors.
What started as an MVP is now a platform trusted by companies moving hundreds of billions of rows – with sub-minute latency, zero data loss, and none of the pipeline babysitting. We raised a $12M Series A led by Dalton Caldwell at Standard Capital, and now any team can get started without talking to us first.
The problems haven't gotten simpler, but we've gotten a lot better at solving them. We're still a lean team, still based in San Francisco, and still obsessed with making real-time data replication easy for the engineers who build on it.
At Artie, we’re all about playing the long game – building products customers will love for years and a team that makes us wonder how we ever got so lucky. We prioritize sustainability over shortcuts, freedom over micromanagement, and results over fluff.
With a no-ego culture, a bias for action, and a commitment to getting 1% better every day, you’ve got a team that’s not just solving tough problems together but having fun doing it. Join us – whether as a customer or a teammate – and let’s create something extraordinary.
