Gretel Raises $12M Series A to Simplify Data Anonymization

Organizations frequently encounter significant challenges when working with data, particularly in preventing the exposure of personally identifiable information (PII) and other confidential data. The process of removing this sensitive information typically demands a laborious and manual undertaking. Gretel, a relatively new company, aims to streamline this process by offering a quicker and more efficient method for data anonymization. The company recently announced a $12 million Series A funding round, spearheaded by Greylock, bringing its total funding to $15.5 million.

According to Gretel’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Watson, the company’s core mission is to simplify data anonymization and enable access to datasets that were previously inaccessible due to privacy considerations.

“For developers, the process of testing an idea or creating a new feature can be delayed for weeks while waiting for data access. This often involves securing approvals, creating a database snapshot, and manually removing potentially personal data, with the uncertainty of having identified everything,” Watson explained.

Watson, formerly a General Manager at AWS, recognized the need for a more rapid and dependable approach to data anonymization, which led to the founding of Gretel. Their initial offering is an open-source, synthetic machine learning library designed for developers to remove personally identifiable information.

“Developers utilize our open-source library, which employs machine learning models trained on their sensitive data. During this training phase, we implement differential privacy, a technique that prevents the model from retaining specific details about individuals within the dataset,” he stated. The outcome is a new, artificial dataset that is anonymized and suitable for secure sharing within an organization.

Established last year, the company has focused this year on developing the open-source product and fostering a community around it. “Our strategy involves open-sourcing our core libraries, alongside the development of a SaaS service that will facilitate the generation of synthetic and anonymized data on a larger scale,” Watson said.

As the company expands, the founders are prioritizing the creation of a diverse and inclusive workplace, a topic regularly addressed during their founders’ meetings, particularly as they prepare to utilize the new investment funds for hiring senior personnel.

“We actively seek a diverse pool of applicants and make a concerted effort to engage with them, which is proving successful with the candidates we are currently considering. We are enthusiastic about this approach, as it is vitally important to avoid the pitfalls of groupthink,” he said.

While Gretel currently does not have any revenue-generating customers, their plan is to leverage relationships with design partners and begin generating revenue in the coming year. Sridhar Ramaswamy, the Greylock partner leading the investment, explained that his firm is investing in a pre-revenue company based on the significant potential of its service.

“We believe Gretel has the potential to revolutionize secure and controlled data access for everyone, much like GitHub transformed access and control of source code,” Ramaswamy said.