When It Comes to Synthetic Data Gretel AI Is a Name You Need to Know

Alex Watson isn’t based in the heart of Silicon Valley, yet his work is shaping one of its most promising AI startups. From his base in San Diego, Watson, a seasoned entrepreneur with a background spanning the U.S. Department of Defense, AWS, and successful startup exits, co-founded Gretel, an AI-driven synthetic data company that is quietly and quickly making its way into Fortune 500 firms.

Gretel’s mission? To solve one of the most pressing challenges in AI: access to high-quality, privacy-preserving data. It’s a problem Watson saw firsthand during his tenure at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where companies struggled to balance data accessibility with security. Instead of building another data management tool, Watson and his co-founders, Ali Golshan and John Myers bet on synthetic data as the key to unlocking AI’s potential.

Gretel was launched in 2019 as a multimodal synthetic data platform, allowing developers to create artificial datasets with the same statistical properties as real data without the regulatory and privacy hurdles. The idea came from Watson’s experience working with large AWS customers who needed ways to train AI models without compromising sensitive data.

“I saw how important data is going to be for AI and machine learning,” Watson explained. “Specifically, how companies struggled to enable access to data themselves. This led us to our initial thesis, which eventually became Gretel: Instead of building another wrapper around data or a silo that never works—what if we could simply make the data safe?”