Opaque buys post-quantum cryptographic AI tech from Abu Dhabi’s TII

Confidential artificial intelligence platform provider Opaque Systems Inc. today announced it has acquired advanced cryptographic AI technologies from the Technology Innovation Institute, the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council.

The acquired technologies add critical capabilities to OPAQUE’s platform: confidential AI model training powered by advanced cryptographic techniques such as multiparty computation and fully homomorphic encryption, as well as post-quantum cryptographic protections.

Founded in 2021 and spun out of the University of California at Berkeley’s RISELab, Opaque sells a platform that lets enterprises run AI models, agents and workflows on sensitive data without exposing it. The company’s pitch is that organizations sit on troves of regulated information, including patient records, financial transactions and proprietary research, that cannot be fed into AI systems under existing privacy and compliance constraints.

The acquired technology extends the platform across training, fine-tuning, inference and AI agent execution.

Opaque says enterprises previously had to stitch together point solutions from multiple vendors to cover each phase of the AI lifecycle, leaving gaps that compliance teams refused to sign off on. The post-quantum cryptography component is intended to protect workloads against future threats from quantum computing.

Cryptographic enforcement on the platform is rooted in hardware via Trusted Execution Environments, with verifiable attestation that Opaque itself cannot access customer data. The platform generates hardware-attested evidence aligned with Service Organization Control 2, International Organization for Standardization 27001, International Organization for Standardization 42001, General Data Protection Regulation Article 32 and European Union AI Act high-risk obligations.

The deal also gives Opaque a foothold in sovereign AI deployments, with cryptographic proof of data residency that the company says will let national AI programs adopt confidential AI without ceding jurisdictional control.

“The future of AI depends on unlocking the data organizations have never been able to touch,” said Ion Stoica, co-founder of Opaque, co-founder of Databricks Inc. and a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. “Most enterprises sit on a corpus of data too sensitive to use and too valuable to ignore.”

Opaque Chief Executive Aaron Fulkerson said hardware-enforced rules are the only way to safely move AI agents into production on regulated systems.

Opaque counts ServiceNow Inc., Anthropic PBC, Accenture plc and Encore Capital Group Inc. among its customers. The acquisition follows the company raising $24 million in a Series B round in February, which valued the startup at $300 million.

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