For years, Vyas Sekar would call up Muckai Girish, an old friend from undergrad, to talk through potential startup ideas and get Girish’s opinion. The two usually talked through an idea and ended the conversation at that. When Sekar called Girish with an idea involving synthetic data in early 2022, the conversation didn’t just end when they hung up the phone.
Sekar and fellow Carnegie Mellon University colleague Giulia Fanti had been working on building synthetic data to fix the reproducibility crisis, or inability to reproduce data, within academia. While Sekar was seeing the need for a solution in academia, Girish knew his customers at the time were facing the same problem. After talking to a few enterprises, the thesis was further validated.
“At that time, it felt that this was very real and there was an opportunity,” Girish, CEO, told TechCrunch. “So that’s what got us started and over the next couple of months we spoke to some investors, people we knew, and more importantly enterprises and realized this was a significant problem and it is worth putting, you know, an entire life behind it.”
The result was Rockfish, a startup that uses generative AI to create synthetic data for operational workflows to help enterprises break down their data silos. Rockfish integrates with database providers including AWS and Azure, among others, and helps users choose the best configuration for their data based on company policies or uses for the data.
Synthetic data has increasingly become a hot topic in the world of AI, but there was already growing momentum for it when the company got started in June 2022. Girish said that Rockfish wanted to make sure that it was building a produ …