Behind Tonic, The “Small & Mighty” Company Redefining Fake Data

When chatting with Grant Wainscott at the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, it’s easy to hear his enthusiasm for the local tech sector.

“Everyone loves a unicorn, but we love to see the early days,” Wainscott told Hypepotamus. 

One of those early-stage companies, Tonic, recently turned heads over at Fast Company. Tonic, with teams out of Atlanta and San Francisco, earned a spot in the 2021 Most Innovative Companies in the ‘Small & Mighty’ category. 

“Tonic’s exactly the type of cutting-edge company that we want here and we want to showcase that [Atlanta] has the capacity to be able to grow a company like that here,” added Wainscott.

While they are in the ‘Small & Mighty’ category, there is nothing tiny about the problem the team is tackling. Tonic is pioneering the space of testing and production data for companies looking to build representative subsets of their data. This helps preserve customer privacy, speed up the product development process, and ensure that companies and startups alike are able to work with de-identified data. 

Adam Kamor, Tonic’s Co-founder and Head of Engineering, told Hypepotamus that while remote work has highlighted the importance of mimicking data in the QA, testing, and development process, the changing data regulation space has also helped bring in new customers.

“There’s all these new regulations coming down the pipeline, like GDPR, CCPA, NYPA,” that have jump-started the need for teams to get off production data. “Whether you’re in the office or at home, that’s equally true.” 

Omed Habib, Tonic’s VP of Marketing, also noted that Tonic’s fake data work has also grown as software development teams have changed. “It used to be an isolated bunch of engineers sitting in one room, and they would throw code over the fence and that would get deployed. Today, we’re seeing a very different environment where software is being built. A team is no more than six or eight people and companies have thousands of teams distributed all across the world, and each team is responsible for their own code and their own database. And not just that, the amount of just sheer data volume of data has just exploded,” said Habib.  

Kamor added that the accolade from Fast Company “reassures us that our obsession with focusing on where our customers need to innovate — and then us innovating in turn to help them — it makes us feel good.”

And perhaps the most exciting news…the team is building up its engineering, customer success, and sales teams out of the Atlanta office. 

 

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