Tonic.ai, a company that mimics production data with fake data that can be used for quality assurance and testing by engineers who are building software, raised $35 million in series B financing led by Insight Partners with participation from GGV Capital, Bloomberg Beta, William Smith from Octave, Heavybit, and Silicon Valley CISO Investments.
Creating a meaningful test set can be time-consuming and challenging. Tonic.ai helps engineers create synthetic data sets that will use the funds to improve developer relations and support future platform development, focusing on implementing machine learning and AI to synthesize test datasets, according to CEO Ian Coe.
Coe said that the company’s goal is to provide production-like data for developers that keep governance and compliance folks inside an organization happy.
“Tonic is a data transformation company that leverages synthetic data, differential privacy and distributed computing. We de-identify sensitive data while preserving all the value of that data so that developers can use it for building and testing software,” added Coe.
Founded in 2018 and with offices in San Francisco and Atlanta, Tonic has around 40 employees. As they push to hire more people with this new influx of capital, they hope to reach at least a 100 in 2022.
The synthetic data market is growing at a rapid clip. According to one analysis, out of the 58 largest startups in the space, 45 percent were created in the last two years. In 2020, venture capital firms injected at least $78 million into these startups, a 78 percent increase from 2019 — boosting the segment to over $210 million in value.
Tonic’s platform leverages AI to preserve ratios, relationships, and dependencies within specific data. It applies differential privacy during data transformations to muffle the impact of outliers and provide mathematical guarantees of confidentiality.
