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Ian Coe
Co-founder and CEO · Tonic.ai
Synthetic data Data privacy
Coe is trying to make sensitive production data safe for developers to use, so engineering teams can build and test software without waiting on access to the real thing.
Ian Coe is co-founder and CEO of Tonic.ai, a San Francisco, California, company that creates realistic synthetic and de-identified copies of sensitive data for software testing and AI work. A former Palantir engineer, he started Tonic in 2018 after years of hand-building fake data for clients who could not share their real records.
Working at a Bank for Palantir
In a 2018 post introducing Tonic, Coe described being one of several Palantir engineers working on site at a large bank after the housing crisis, analyzing its mortgage portfolio. At 2 a.m. they were debugging failing code with “a large, brilliant development team in Palo Alto eager to help them,” and no way to send over the client data, which was full of Social Security numbers and salary details.
Starting Tonic
He and his co-founders had worked around that problem several times by building synthetic data by hand, work he wrote took “weeks of a talented engineers’ time.” Tonic set out to automate it.
