OPAQUE Raises $24M Series B
OPAQUE closed a $24 million Series B at a $300 million valuation to advance confidential AI for enterprises. Ando secured $4 million in seed funding to make hourly work more predictable using AI, while Big Health raised $24 million as investors bet on digital therapeutics promise.
- The new funding brings OPAQUE's total raised capital to $55.5 million. The Series B round was led by Walden Catalyst and included participation from returning investors like Intel Capital, Race Capital, Storm Ventures, and Thomvest, along with a new strategic partner, the Advanced Technology Research Council. - OPAQUE's technology is rooted in research from the University of California, Berkeley's RISELab, the same lab that produced projects like Databricks and Apache Spark. The company's co-founders include professors and researchers from the lab, such as Ion Stoica, who also co-founded Databricks. - The company's platform is built on the concept of "confidential computing," which uses hardware-based secure enclaves to process sensitive data without exposing it. This allows enterprises in regulated fields like finance and healthcare to run AI models on encrypted data, addressing privacy and compliance risks that often stall AI initiatives. - A key feature of OPAQUE's platform is providing verifiable proof that data privacy and governance policies were enforced during computation. This cryptographic attestation helps close the "trust chasm" for CISOs and legal teams concerned about data leakage with AI models. - The company was founded in 2021, and its platform is based on the open-source project MC2 (Multiparty Collaboration and Competition), which was developed by the founders at Berkeley. - Use cases for OPAQUE's technology include collaborative fraud detection, where multiple institutions can analyze combined data without revealing their individual datasets, and running generative AI on proprietary information like financial records or intellectual property. - The push for Confidential AI is endorsed by major tech players like NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft Azure, and AWS, indicating a broader industry move toward securing AI workflows. Young Sohn, from lead investor Walden Catalyst, noted that verifiable protection for data and AI models is becoming "non-negotiable" for enterprises.
