The global market for synthetic data generation technologies is growing fast, analysts say. Grand View Research estimates that it will reach 1,8 billion dollars by 2030, because companies and resarch organizations need more and more "artificial" data that mimic actual datapoints features and trends and can be analyzed without privacy issues. Next year, 60% of data used in AI projects is expected to be generated synthetically.

Italian startup Aindo works in this field and, confirming the highly innovative value recognized in synthetic data technology, has been selected by ICE, the Italian government Agency for the Promotion Abroad and Internationalization of Italian Enterprises, to participate in CES 2024.

Aindo was founded in 2018 by three young experts in the field of Artificial Intelligence (Daniele Panfilo, CEO; Sebastiano Saccani, Head of R&D; Borut Svara, CTO) and is a spinoff of SISSA (Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati) in Trieste.

From its very start, Aindo operated with success in the AI market, closing important contracts with multinationals in healthcare and finance. In October 2023, Aindo signed the agreement for a 6 million euros investment from United Ventures and Vertis Venture 3 Technology Transfer. The funding allows Aindo to strengthen the team and continue the development of solutions facilitating AI use in strategic sectors such as healthcare, finance and PA.

Aindo's synthetic data - the company explains - aren't collected empirically but generated artificially, through machine learning models able to create artificial data that faithfully reproduce the characteristics and behaviors of actual data. In this way, synthetic data retain the statistical value contained in the original data. At the same time, being artificial, they cointain no sensitive information and can therefore be exchanged and analyzed securely, with no risks for anyone's privacy.

Getting the chance to introduce its technology at CES 2024 validates Aindo's approach, says CEO and co-founder Daniele Panfilo: "The market is increasingly aware of how this technology will change our future, making it possible to use large amounts of artificial data for innovation and research, while protecting the privacy of individuals".

A revolution in health research?

In some specific applications, Aindo's technologies can actually be revolutionary. An important example involves medical research on rare diseases. In this field, synthetic data let researchers use data augmentation techniques: generating rich datasets starting from a smaller source dataset. Usually, rare diseases have sparse data, and the disease early identification algorithm is unable to achieve performance because it does not have enough data to work on.

With synthetic data generation, underrepresented classes can be repopulated or rebalanced and the synthetic dataset can be used to train the model for rare disease identification. Compared with traditional solutions for detecting rare diseases, data augmentation makes it possible to reduce the rate of false positives, which are an obstacle and cost to health research.