Tonic: Innovating Synthetic Data Creation for Diverse Use Cases

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This chapter explores Tonic's journey in developing synthetic data for structured data domains, emphasizing the importance of test data in application development and the challenges of filling empty databases realistically. It delves into creating synthetic data that replicates complex business logic and the company's core values centered around data privacy and innovation. The conversation also covers the technical aspects of loading data into databases, sub-setting technology, and addressing real-world database issues like handling cycles of foreign keys and ensuring determinism in sub-setting algorithms.

All robust technology platforms require testing to ensure that features work as intended. In many cases, tests require data, but getting access to valid and high quality test data is a common challenge, especially when the technology runs on sensitive data. Realistically mimicking data that would normally contain sensitive financial or personal information is not easy.

Tonic.ai was started in 2018 to provide developer tools to transform production data into safe testing data. Andrew Colombi is the CTO and Adam Kamor is the Head of Engineering at Tonic. They join the show to talk about creating realistic synthetic data, data de-identification, validating LLM RAG output, Tonic’s subsetting engine, and much more.

Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Tonic.

Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk.