Synthetic Data with Ian Coe, Andrew Colombi, and Adam Kamor

Over the past few years, the conventional wisdom around the value proposition of Big Data has begun to shift. While the prevailing attitude towards Big Data may once have been “bigger is better,” many organizations today recognize that broad-scale data collection comes with its own set of risks. Data privacy is becoming a hotly debated topic both in the technology industry and in regulatory agencies and governments. Bigger and less private datasets are more attractive targets for hackers, meaning that an organization must invest heavily in security as well to avoid a breach. Every organization faces a tradeoff between the value of the insights produced from large datasets versus increased storage costs and increasing privacy risks. 

Tonic is building a “synthetic data” platform to address these tradeoffs and help organizations mitigate data risk. Tonic takes in raw data, perhaps from a data lake, and transforms it into more manageable, de-identified data sets for ease of use and user privacy. Tonic can create statistically identical, structured datasets that allow software engineers and business analysts to extract the same useful insights that drive an organization’s progress, without the risk of working with identifiable, private user data. 

Ian Coe, Andrew Colombi, and Adam Kamor are co-founders of Tonic. Along with their fourth co-founder, Karl Hanson, Ian, Andrew, and Adam all worked together at Palantir Technologies where the idea for Tonic was born. They join the show today to talk about the value of synthetic data, the risks and rewards of big data, and how compliance, privacy, and security are driving innovation in the data management sector.

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