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.