Tonic, a synthetic data software company dual-based in Atlanta and San Francisco, has raised an $8 million Series A round to expand its team in both offices.
The round was led by GGV Capital and had participation from Bloomberg Beta, Xfund, Heavybit and Silicon Valley CISO Investments.
Tonic, founded in 2018, creates fake data out of a company’s real data so developers can use it to expand the company’s products. Using fake data allows companies to have better security for their customer’s information.
For example, the Tonic software can create a synthetic data set of medical records that mimics the real data so engineers or marketing employees can use that fake data to test prototypes or campaigns without breaching medical privacy concerns.
CEO and co-founder Ian Coe, based in San Franscico, said Tonic has more than two dozen customers, including eBay and Flexport.
Tonic can create synthetic data for industries such as health-care, financial services, education technology and e-commerce. It plans to expand its industry capabilities, expand its collaboration functions and increase its data warehousing technologies, Atlanta-based co-founder and head of engineering Adam Kamor said.
Tonic has a team of about 15 people right now, and Coe said they’re hiring “as many as people as we can get,” in all sectors of the business, including marketing and customer success.
Because of the cross-country offices, the pandemic didn’t affect how the Tonic team functioned, Kamor said. But it did show companies adjusting to work-from-home operations the importance of keeping real data safe. In 2020, the company has increased its revenue by more than 600%, according to the announcement about the funding round.
The offices also give them an advantage of having a wider talent pool from which to recruit, Kamor said. Kamor, who’s a Georgia Tech grad, pointed to the university system and budding tech ecosystem as a reason the Atlanta headquarters made sense. That, and the Georgia native missed his hometown.
Coe and Kamor met each other while working at Tableau, where they saw the struggles that companies had in wanting to test new products but also wanting their data to be secure.
When Coe had to manually change a real data set to synthetic, the idea for Tonic was formed. CTO Andrew Colombi and COO Karl Hanson also co-founded the companies.
