Graz-based TACEO, a startup building infrastructure for secure computation on encrypted data, today announces it has closed its €4.8 million Seed funding round.
The round is led by Archetype VC with participation from a16z CSX, Cyber.Fund, A.Capital Ventures, Polymorphic Capital, and a number of prominent angel investors.
Lukas Helminger, Co-founder and CEO, comments: “For over a decade, industries have needed to compute across private, distributed datasets, yet privacy and collaboration never coexisted. The ability to instantly verify encrypted information without revealing the data is no longer a nice-to-have – it’s essential if we want to achieve transparency, fairness, and control in the AI era – before we no longer have the choice. The new cash injection will help us scale our technology to solve what we believe is the internet’s biggest unsolved problem.”
Formed in 2022, TACEO was founded by a team from Graz University of Technology. The team were first known for creating the Poseidon hash function (now a de-facto standard in zero-knowledge systems), and then a COVID-19 infection tracking system. These projects proved privacy-preserving, high-performance cryptography at scale.
TACEO builds software that lets multiple parties collaborate on sensitive data without exposing the underlying information or the need for centralised trust. This data model – a “Private Shared State” – is powered by a cryptographic tool called coSNARKs that combines two approaches: one for protecting data during computation, (Multiparty Computation – MPC) and one for proving outcomes (Zero-Knowledge Proofs – ZK).
TACEO says it has already shown it can make cutting edge technology commercially viable through its partnership with Sam Altman’s World (formerly WorldCoin). TACEO was tasked with creating software for its iris matching verification service – used to give access to the World network. TACEO’s solution ensures that the biometric data of over 14 million people remains fully encrypted – even to World themselves. This is allegedly the largest MPC-secured dataset on public record.
“Decentralised compute has evolved rapidly in recent years. As on-chain use cases proliferate, the need for native private shared state as core infrastructure becomes more and more obvious,” says Archetype Founder and General Partner, Ash Egan. “TACEO is at the forefront of building programmable privacy into the Web3 compute stack, and we have had massive conviction in Lukas and the team since we first met, following Lukas’s presentation on coSNARKs at Archetype HQ. TACEO’s mission is wildly bold, and we’re ecstatic to announce our partnership with the team as they lock in ‘Private Shared State’ as a core computing standard for crypto.”
The company says it could enable AI LLMs and autonomous agents to verify facts and make decisions without accessing personal or proprietary information. The result is enhanced privacy, stronger security and smarter AI.
Equally, decentralised finance (DeFi) – such as stablecoins, which reached a market value of over €219 billion this year – continues to struggle with the trade-off between transparency and privacy. Institutions must either rely on public blockchains that expose sensitive data, or build their own infrastructure, which is complex, error-prone and incompatible with the broader web.
TACEO’s software offers a potential third path: allowing any payment provider to securely verify transactions and identities while proving compliance across decentralised networks – without exposing the underlying data.
Philipp Sippl, board member of World, comments: “We’ve deployed TACEO to build one of the largest privacy preserving systems in the world. The problem that we’re addressing is not a theoretical one, it’s a problem that needs a solution now and it’s also very important that such a system is built in a way that ensures strong cryptographic privacy, especially with such a widespread application. TACEO’s infrastructure here has been key to fulfill that mission.”
The capital from this round will be used to grow the team and scale the technology, expanding TACEO’s use cases beyond crypto and DeFi into all sectors where confidential data is critical – such as identity verification, financial services, and AI.
