Synthetic Data In A Nutshell — Why VC Money Grow 10-fold

Sven Balnojan
7 min readFeb 7, 2024
Image by the author. Synthetic data is like a crystal ball, fake, and yet it works.

Ali, Alex, and John walk into a bar. All three are genius tech guys who worked at the NSA and know the bleeding edge of technology regarding data.

The three decide to create a company on the cutting edge of data. A question for you: What do you think they come up with?

AI? Well, not really. Do you think they’d use their experience to go into the security sector? Again, kind of, but not really. What the three come up with is surprising: They want to build a company around fake data.

The story sounds almost like a joke, yet it isn’t. Ali, Alex, and John are the co-founders of gretel, already practically a giant in synthetic data with the latest series B worth $50m.

In hindsight, it’s hard for the three to describe what led them down this particular path in 2020, quite early to the game. However, I think two visionary insights stand out if you look into their journey.

Ali and his team had seen the cutting-edge tech inside the NSA, and they know language models and likely other models will only get better at generating data. They knew the tech would get there.

“Gretel actually started in 2019 using language models to build synthetic data, because our assumption was language models actually carry much better insights from the…

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Sven Balnojan
Sven Balnojan

Written by Sven Balnojan

Head of Marketing @ Arch | Data PM | “Data Mesh in Action” | Join my free data newsletters at http://thdpth.com/ and https://svenbalnojan.gumroad.com/l/oivjd

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