Startup Gretel AI raises $50M

In a recent Series B investment round, privacy engineering-as-a-service startup Gretel AI raised $50M to continue its journey towards providing privacy tools to all developers. With big data technologies and machine learning tools increasingly being used at enterprises across the world, the importance of embedding privacy protections into these solutions is only going to grow.

The main benefit of Gretel AI is the power it gives engineers to produce anonymised, synthetic data sets from in-house data sets that can be fed into machine learning tools to train them effectively. An open-source core is used to support Gretel tools, with their synthetics library being downloaded more than 70,000 times and the number of users of this service growing by 500% in the last year.

While the Gretel AI product is still in open beta, it is currently allowing developers to try the solution out. The most recent Series B funding round was led by Anthos Capital with Section 32, Greylock and Moonshots Capital also participating. When the new funding is taken into account, the start-up has raised a total of $65.5 million.

According to Ali Golshan, CEO of Gretel AI, the engineering-driven solution the start-up is working to build helps engineers and developers address the most pressing friction points around data privacy.

“In today’s world where data is integrated into our lives; the products and services we use, and throughout our digital experiences, “privacy by design” is critical to the development process and requires developer-native tools to enable it,” says Golshan.

“Our work with our customers shows synthetic data can have less bias and better accuracy for training an AI model than real-world data based on actual objects, events or people,” he adds.