219 AI developers voted across a fragmented and evolving category. Here is what the results reveal about the state of synthetic data.
The March 2026 IT Brand Pulse AI Brand Leader survey asked 219 members of the AI developer community to vote for Market Leader and Intelligence & Innovation Leader in Synthetic Data Platforms, one of 26 products in the AI Engineering stack. Gretel.ai took the top position in both categories, receiving 27.9% of votes for Market Leader and 30.1% for Intelligence & Innovation Leader.
The presence of multiple vendors with double-digit share, along with a meaningful “Others” category, suggests a fragmented and evolving market where different approaches—structured data synthesis, simulation-based generation, and privacy-first architectures—are all gaining traction. The IT Brand Pulse analyst team expects synthetic data to become increasingly important as privacy regulations tighten and AI systems require more diverse training data.
What Are Synthetic Data Platforms?
IT Brand Pulse defines Synthetic Data Platforms as systems that generate artificial datasets that statistically mirror real-world data while preserving privacy, enabling AI and machine learning development without exposing sensitive information. These platforms provide structured data synthesis, image and video simulation, privacy-preserving data generation, bias control, and data augmentation. Synthetic data platforms are increasingly critical for overcoming data scarcity, accelerating model training, and ensuring compliance with privacy regulations across industries such as healthcare, finance, and autonomous systems. Synthetic Data Platforms sits within the Data & Retrieval sub-layer of the broader AI Engineering stack, alongside Data Labeling Platforms and Feature Stores.
Download the Brand Leader Report for Synthetic Data Platforms.
