TACEO raises $5.5M to scale privacy-preserving encrypted data collaboration platform

Austrian cryptographic startup TACEO has secured $5.5 million in Seed funding led by Archetype, with participation from a16z crypto, cyber•Fund, A.Capital Ventures, Polymorphic Capital, WAGMI Ventures, and Daedalus Angel Syndicate, bringing total funding to $6 million as the Graz-based company scales its "Private Shared State" technology for secure collaborative computation.

Founded in 2022, TACEO addresses the fundamental challenge of enabling multiple parties to compute and verify data on encrypted datasets without revealing underlying information. The company's technology combines Multiparty Computation (MPC) and Zero-Knowledge Proofs through a novel cryptographic technique called coSNARKs, allowing facts to be proven without disclosing inputs or relying on centralized trust.

Central to TACEO's innovation is their Private Shared State approach that enables secure collaborative computation across sectors requiring strong privacy guarantees, including decentralized finance, identity verification, and AI applications. This technology supports use cases like secure transaction verification and clinical trials while maintaining data confidentiality throughout the computation process.

The platform has gained significant real-world validation through its deployment with World (formerly Worldcoin), where TACEO's encryption software secures biometric iris data for over 14 million users in Sam Altman's identity verification project. This partnership demonstrates the scalability and reliability of their cryptographic infrastructure for large-scale privacy-critical applications.

TACEO also develops the CLS (Computation Layer System), a modular network architecture allowing various devices from edge hardware to GPU clusters to participate in computation networks. The funding will support team expansion and scaling of their privacy-preserving technology as demand grows for confidential and verifiable data collaboration across industries.

Founders: Lukas Helminger, Daniel Kales

Sources: EU-Startups, FinSMEs, BiometricUpdate