Making Data Work

In today’s largely cloud-native world, having access to real world data is critical in order for organizations to derive meaning that drives innovation.

Yet most organizations are still contending with inadequate tools that enable them to safely share, collaborate, and build with data. What’s more, many businesses lack the engineering resources to develop workarounds in the form of anonymized data sets or synthetic datasets that can be used to run powerful tests.

Ali Golshan, the CEO and co-founder of Gretel.ai, says that dynamic has put the majority of businesses and organizations at a disadvantage when it comes to innovation, which is exactly where Gretel.ai comes in. The company, which was founded in 2019, aims to be the “GitHub of data,” stepping into to provide tools for data similar to the way the open platform effectively democratized building with code. Greylock has been an investor since 2020, and Sridhar Ramaswamy is on the company’s board.

“You have better tools, you get better data, you have more data, you can build better tools,” says Golshan. “Considering the immersive world we’re venturing into beyond the traditional web 2.0, and more sensors, IoT data collection with different types of methods, we felt like that the larger community had the right to be able to not only have as great of set of tools, but to also be able to share and collaborate with that data.”

Gretel.ai works with a wide range of organizations across industry sectors including gaming platforms and healthcare and biotech organizations including genomic sequencing giant Illumina. Initially developed for heavily data-focused personas such as ML/AI engineers and data scientists, the platform became generally available for any user in February.

Golshan sat down with Greylock head of content and editorial Heather Mack on the Greymatter podcast to discuss the current data-powered business landscape and how Gretel.ai is enabling innovation. You can listen to the podcast at the link below, on YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.