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What is Tonic? Why did you build it?

Tonic.ai is the fake data company. We provide fake data so that developers and QA can test their application code against safe, de-identified versions of their application database.

Why would you use fake or synthetic data instead of real data? Particularly in regulated industries, access to data is very difficult. It may be impossible to test against production data. Even outside of regulated industries, you don't necessarily want to be working with customer data as a developer. The more distance you can get from real sensitive data as a developer or data scientist, the safer everyone is.

Recently, we've been building a product, Djinn, which is focused on the data-science workflow and those use cases. Instead of building an entire de-identified production, de-identified application database, the data-science workflow typically starts with a dataset, which is some view or table within this application database.

The tool takes these views and builds generative models that are capable of producing synthetic data, which has the same statistical properties as the real data. Synthetic data can be used in place of real data to train machine-learning models, build dashboards, to do exploratory data analysis.

This lets the data scientists get started on their job a lot faster than they could if they were waiting around for access to real data. This is something that we're quite excited about. In addition to the privacy use case, increasingly we're seeing people that want to use synthetic data for the data augmentation use case.