Ian Coe

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 with co-founders including Andrew Colombi and Adam Kamor after years of hand-building fake data for clients who could not share their real records.

Two in the morning at a bank

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 the fake data company

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 and picked developers and test environments as its first market. “You can’t change the entire world at once,” Coe said on the Category Visionaries podcast, explaining why the team held off on analytics use cases it saw as closer to a research problem. Tonic leaned into a playful brand and called itself the fake data company.

Coe credits plain, useful technical content and referrals for much of Tonic’s growth, including customers who brought it along when they changed jobs. “The most important thing you can do with a customer that’s significantly larger than you is do the things you say you’re going to do,” he said.