NVIDIA has reportedly acquired Gretel, a San Diego-based startup that develops a platform for generating synthetic artificial intelligence training data. Terms of the acquisition are unclear. According to Wired, the acquisition price is as high as nine figures, exceeding Gretel's recent valuation of $320 million.
Gretel and its team of approximately 80 employees will be integrated into NVIDIA, and its technology will be used as part of NVIDIA's generative AI services for developers.
Gretel was founded in 2019 by Alex Watson, Laszlo Bock, John Myers and Ali Golshan, who also serves as the company's CEO. The startup fine-tunes the models, adds proprietary technology to them, and then packages the models for sale.
Gretel raised more than $67 million in venture capital from investors including Anthos Capital, Greylock and Moonshots Capital before exiting, according to Crunchbase data.
NVIDIA's acquisition is strategic and timely. Tech giants like Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic are already using synthetic data to train flagship AI models as they run out of real-world data sources.