In an era of frequent data breaches and the delicate balance between transparency and privacy, industries like AI, decentralised finance, and identity verification face significant challenges. Traditionally, collaborating on sensitive data meant either exposing private information or losing control. TACEO, an Austrian startup founded in 2022, is transforming this landscape by enabling multiple parties to work on encrypted data without revealing any details.
Today, TACEO announced the successful closure of a $5.5 million seed funding round led by Archetype VC, with notable participants including a16z CSX, Cyber.Fund, a_capital, and Polymorphic Capital. This funding will accelerate the deployment of TACEO’s innovative “Private Shared State,” a new data infrastructure enabling joint computation, verification, and updates on encrypted datasets without trusted centralisation or data exposure.
While the company’s current valuation remains undisclosed, this $5.5 million seed funding builds upon a previous seven-figure pre-seed round.
The minds behind TACEO
TACEO was founded at Graz University of Technology and the Know-Centre, a leading European research hub for cryptography and data science. The founding team emerged from a research group led by Professor Christian Rechberger, who developed the Poseidon hash function: now a standard in zero-knowledge cryptography. To transform innovative research into market-ready solutions, the team combined cryptographic expertise with strategic business skills.
Lukas Helminger, co-founder and CEO, previously worked as a cryptography researcher, lecturer at TU Graz, and contributor to the Austrian Defence Department. He clearly states TACEO’s purpose: “For over a decade, industries have needed to compute across private, distributed datasets, yet privacy and collaboration have never coexisted. That changes with Private Shared State.”
CEO Helminger is supported by co-founder and CPO Lukas Goetz, a crypto veteran since 2014 known for pioneering blockchain projects, including the world’s first legally binding on-chain wedding contract. Chief Scientist Christian Rechberger continues to uphold the project’s scientific integrity. The five-member founding team combines expertise in cryptographic protocols, systems engineering, and secure computation, with some members maintaining a low profile for strategic reasons.
TACEO employs 14 people from six countries, including Austria, France, Ireland, Israel, Spain, and the USA, bringing skills in cryptography, systems engineering, distributed networks, and business strategy. This diverse team reflects the global nature of the privacy-preserving systems they develop.
Ais Connolly, Chief Strategy Officer, shares insights about working as a woman in tech: “There’s still a default assumption that women aren’t technical. I had to prove credibility first, and that wears you down. My advice: avoid the lure of compromise, especially with your technical skills. Surround yourself with people who support you; it’s more efficient for everyone.”
Tackling a real market need
TACEO’s inception was driven by a clear market need, not theoretical curiosity. In a conversation with TFN, Helminger explains: “We’d already seen firsthand the problems with collaborating on sensitive data in industries like payments and banking, especially when no one wanted to expose confidential information. Our research group was building a privacy-preserving biometric matching system for a government project, and it became clear that the core challenge was enabling collaboration over encrypted data at scale. That’s the problem we set out to solve with Private Shared State.”
Today, collaborating with sensitive data remains one of the internet’s most challenging issues. Whether it’s cross-border payments requiring both privacy and regulatory compliance, identity verification needing selective disclosure, AI agents managing personal data, or decentralised finance protocols aiming for transparency with privacy, TACEO addresses the long-standing trade-off between collaboration and confidentiality that has hindered progress for years.
The technology that sets TACEO apart
TACEO’s core solution combines advanced cryptography techniques: Multiparty Computation (MPC) and coSNARKs. MPC allows multiple parties to process private data without revealing their inputs, while coSNARKs enable groups to generate concise proofs verifying a computation’s correctness without exposing the data.
This integration creates “Private Shared State,” a cryptographically secure, encrypted environment supporting updates, computations, and audits over time without compromising sensitive information. Unlike systems offering only static private computations or single-use proofs, TACEO’s platform enables continuous, collaborative, and scalable state management.
The company has proven its capabilities by supporting biometric authentication for over 14 million users in Sam Altman’s World ID (formerly WorldCoin), making it the largest publicly known secure multi-party computation dataset.
Helminger emphasises the company’s vital approach: “Privacy and collaboration are no longer tradeoffs. This funding round lets us scale the tech, the team, and the network to make that future usable.”
Major competitors include Zama (focusing on homomorphic encryption for AI and messaging), Duality Tech (specialising in enterprise secure computing), Fhenix (working on FHE for smart contracts), Partisia (offering an MPC-based blockchain layer-1), and Rosemanlabs (providing multiparty analytics for regulated industries). TACEO’s distinct advantage lies in facilitating mutable, verifiable, and encrypted collaboration over time, backed by a track record of successful large-scale deployment.
What’s next for TACEO?
Looking ahead, TACEO aims to establish Private Shared State as a fundamental internet primitive by improving core infrastructure for performance, scalability, and reliability. The project will expand developer tools, including SDKs like coNoir, to make integration more accessible without requiring deep cryptographic knowledge.
This effort seeks to promote real-world adoption across finance, identity, AI, and stablecoins, showcasing privacy-preserving, compliant transaction flows and AI memory collaboration. Additionally, TACEO aims to foster an open ecosystem, set industry standards, and collaborate with broader cryptography and decentralised compute communities.
Helminger sums it up: “We’re working to build the foundation for programmable privacy and trust online, so that verifying sensitive data doesn’t mean exposing it.”
By unlocking the combination of privacy and seamless collaboration, TACEO is shaping the future of data verification and secure cooperation across decentralised and regulated systems. As Helminger concludes: “If we want transparency, fairness, and control in the AI era, the ability to instantly verify encrypted information without revealing the data is no longer a luxury, it’s essential.”
