At TACEO, we believe the digital world is on the cusp of a profound transformation, one where privacy and verifiable trust are no longer mutually exclusive. We are building the foundational layer for this new era, and today, we’re thrilled to announce a significant step forward: the close of our $5.5 million Seed round. This investment, led by Archetype, with strong participation from a16z CSX, cyber•Fund, a_capital, Polymorphic, and other key partners, is a shared commitment to building a more private and provably fair digital future. You can hear directly from some of our investors and partners on why they believe in TACEO and our vision.
The Challenge We’re Solving: When Privacy Meets Public Trust
Think about how we interact with data online today. Much of it is either completely public – visible to anyone, which is great for transparency but terrible for sensitive information – or completely private, locked away in centralized silos, requiring you to trust a single entity. In the decentralized world, this tension is even more pronounced. Public blockchains, while great for verifiability, expose everything. Private solutions often mean sacrificing the very decentralization that makes crypto powerful.
This is the “internet’s biggest unsolved problem,” as we see it, and it’s precisely what TACEO was founded to solve. How do we enable multiple parties to work together, compute complex data, and verify outcomes, without revealing the underlying sensitive information? As Ethereum enters its second decade, with billions in value flowing through its networks, the demand for true privacy and uncompromised security has never been more urgent. Our work empowers developers to build applications that can process encrypted data, performing complex computations, while simultaneously generating undeniable cryptographic proof that everything was done correctly.
How We’re Doing It: The Rise of coSNARKs and Our Private Shared State Network
You may have heard terms like Zero-Knowledge (ZK) or Multiparty Computation (MPC). These are powerful tools in the programmable privacy stack, offering incredible potential for secure data handling.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZK) allow one party to prove a statement is true without revealing any underlying information. This is great for privacy in single-player settings, where one entity needs to prove something about their data without disclosing the data itself. However, for a collaborative internet where multiple parties need to compute together on shared, private data, ZK alone isn’t enough; it requires private computation across multiple entities.
Multiparty Computation (MPC) allows several parties to jointly compute a function over their private inputs without ever revealing those inputs to each other. This is crucial for collaboration, but historically, MPC has faced significant hurdles when trying to scale for complex, real-world applications – often proving too slow or too resource-intensive for practical use. Moreover, a critical, often-overlooked challenge with MPC is the necessity of a robust, decentralized network to perform the computations. Bootstrapping and, crucially, incentivizing these MPC networks has proven to be one of the greatest blockers to widespread adoption. Building a distributed system of participants willing to contribute compute power reliably and securely is incredibly complex.
We’re breaking through these limitations by pioneering coSNARK infrastructure and meticulously designing a network to enable practical, performant privacy at scale.
So, what exactly are coSNARKs? They are a powerful cryptographic primitive that uniquely combines the strengths of both MPC and ZK, enabling collaborative proof generation over distributed secrets without compromising privacy. They allow multiple parties to jointly prove a statement is true, on secret shared data, with little overhead beyond ZK. It’s a game-changer for building truly private and verifiable applications in multi-party scenarios. You can dive deeper into our coSNARKs documentation here.
Beyond coSNARKs, we’re building a private shared state network. This is a network that maintains the encrypted, persistent state required for long-running, collaborative computations in decentralized applications, distinguishing it from single-shot cryptographic operations. This aims to address the demanding performance needs of decentralized applications, and crucially, do so in a way that solves the bootstrapping and incentivization challenges that have plagued earlier MPC efforts. Our network architecture makes it viable to run these complex private computations, delivering a critical piece of the puzzle. It complements ZK proofs by providing the collaborative compute infrastructure for generating proofs over shared, encrypted state, thereby enabling massive computation while enhancing verifiability and maintaining privacy within our private shared state.
This deep technical foundation comes directly from our roots in cryptography research at Graz University of Technology, where our team was instrumental in creating the Poseidon hash function – now a standard in ZK systems.
Real-World Impact: Powering World ID, Empowering Aztec Builders, and Launching Our Production-Ready Private Proof Network
Our work is already making a tangible difference in the real world, at scale, across multiple fronts.
First, we are incredibly proud to collaborate with World on the MPC protocol underpinning their Iris uniqueness checks. This means we are the technology securing the privacy of over 14 million people, enabling millions of biometric checks every month for Worldcoin’s system. This brings MPC from a theoretical concept to a live, large-scale deployment showcasing the robustness and commercial viability of our approach in one of the most privacy-sensitive applications globally. You can learn more about the technical details of the World Iris protocol here.
Second, we’re actively contributing vital infrastructure improvements to the Aztec ecosystem. Through our coNoir tooling, we’re making it easy for developers to integrate private shared state into their applications directly. This allows builders to create privacy-preserving apps on Ethereum with unprecedented ease, opening up new possibilities in DeFi, decentralized identity, and beyond.
And third, we’ve successfully launched a production-ready private proof network: TACEO:Proof. This represents a significant milestone, providing a live network where developers can delegate the generation of zero-knowledge proofs to a secure, privacy-preserving compute network. It’s a critical piece of infrastructure that allows for faster, more efficient, and fully private proof generation, moving beyond the constraints of client-side proving.
Before TACEO, builders often faced a stark choice. Either expose sensitive data on a public chain, which sacrifices privacy for verifiability, or sink immense resources into complex, often proprietary, off-chain solutions that struggled with decentralization and trust.
We offer a third path. Now, any payment provider, identity verifier, or DeFi protocol can securely verify transactions and identities while proving compliance across decentralized networks, all without exposing the underlying confidential data. This is how we bring true privacy and verifiable trust to the internet.
Towards Private Shared State: Our Vision for a Collaborative Internet
Our ultimate vision is a world where private shared state isn’t a niche concept, but a fundamental primitive of the internet. Imagine a web where:
- AI models can train on vast, sensitive datasets across different organizations without any single party ever seeing the raw data.
- Decentralized identity systems can verify credentials and attestations instantly, without revealing your personal information to anyone.
- Financial institutions can collaborate on fraud detection, risk assessment, or even dark pools, maintaining complete confidentiality while ensuring verifiable correctness.
- Healthcare providers can share aggregated insights from patient data for research, without compromising individual privacy.
Our aim is to go far beyond enhancing the privacy of existing apps, and to unlock entirely new categories of applications and collaborations that are simply impossible today due to privacy and trust barriers.
Our roadmap to achieving this vision is as follows:
- Strengthen core infrastructure: Continue to refine and optimize our coSNARKs network to fully facilitate computation on and private shared state. Furthermore, we’ll strive to enhance performance, scalability, and developer experience.
- Expand developer tooling: Build out more comprehensive libraries and SDKs (like coNoir) to make it even easier for developers to integrate private shared state into their applications, regardless of their cryptographic expertise.
- Drive adoption in key verticals: Work closely with leading projects and enterprises in areas like DeFi, identity, and AI to demonstrate the transformative power of private shared state through real-world deployments.
- Spawn a collaborative ecosystem: Engage with the broader privacy and decentralized compute communities to establish standards and accelerate the adoption of these critical technologies.
We are committed to building the open infrastructure that will enable this future, creating a more secure, fair, and collaborative digital world for everyone.
Why Now? The Inevitable Rise of Programmable Privacy
We believe the timing for TACEO’s technology is critical. We are at a pivotal moment where the converging demands for privacy, security, and verifiable collaboration are shaping the future of digital interactions.
“For over a decade, industries have needed to compute across private, distributed datasets, yet privacy and collaboration never coexisted,” emphasizes Lukas Helminger, TACEO Co-founder and CEO. “The ability to instantly verify encrypted information without revealing the data is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ – it’s a ‘must-have.’ It’s essential if we want to achieve transparency, fairness, and control in the AI era, before fundamental choices are made for us. This new capital will help us scale our technology to solve what we believe is the internet’s biggest unsolved problem.”
The explosion of AI, the increasing focus on data privacy regulations, and the constant evolution of cyber threats all underscore the urgent need for a new paradigm in data handling – one built on programmable privacy. We are uniquely positioned to lead this transformation, not just within the crypto space but across all sectors where confidential data is paramount: from finance and healthcare to supply chain management and digital identity.
Ash Egan, Founder and General Partner at Archetype VC, shares our conviction: “Crypto 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. TACEO is at the forefront of building programmable privacy into the crypto compute stack, and we have built massive conviction in Lukas and the larger team’s ability since our first meeting 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 primitive for crypto.”
Our Team’s Foundation
TACEO was founded in 2022 by a team from Christian Rechberger’s research group at Graz University of Technology, bringing together deep expertise in cryptography, large-scale MPC deployment, and developer tooling. Today, as TACEO continues to grow, Lukas Helminger (CEO), Lukas Götz (CPO), and Aisling Connolly (CSO) guide our strategic direction and product development. They embody the blend of technical understanding and strategic vision essential for navigating this complex field.
Lukas Helminger, our CEO, was a cryptography researcher and lecturer whose work at Graz University of Technology and the Austrian Defense Department laid much of the theoretical and practical groundwork for what has now become TACEO. His disciplined background, even as an international cyclist, speaks to the precision and rigorous problem-solving that defines TACEO’s approach.
Lukas Götz, our CPO, has been actively shaping the crypto space since 2014, with a history of co-founding ventures in DeFi and real-world assets. His pioneering work, like launching the world’s first legally binding on-chain wedding contract, showcases a commitment to pushing the boundaries of what blockchain can achieve. At TACEO, he leads our product vision, ensuring our technical breakthroughs translate into practical, impactful solutions for you, the builders.
Aisling Connolly, our CSO, holds degrees in math, economics, and computer science, and obtained her PhD from the ENS in Paris. She has spent the past years working extensively on threshold cryptography and confidential computing, across both traditional finance and web3. She leads strategic development across research, product positioning, and the critical compliance dimensions of privacy infrastructure, bridging deep technical insight with long-term vision.
Lukas, Lukas, and Aisling represent the public-facing part of TACEO’s leadership team. Their work on strategy and execution rests on the strong technical and operational foundation led by Daniel Kales and Stefan Plank, supported by a growing team that continues to drive the company forward.
Together, we’re laying the foundational infrastructure for a more secure, private, and verifiable internet for everyone. The future of digital collaboration is private, and we invite you to build it with us.
To learn more about how TACEO is empowering a new era of private, verifiable computation, visit us at https://taceo.io/ and follow our journey on X at https://x.com/TACEO_IO.
