Company: TACEO
CEO: Lukas Helminger, Daniel Kales (CTO), Roman Walch (Lead Cryptographer), Lukas G枚tz (CPO), Stefan Plank (COO), Christian Rechberger (Chief Scientist).
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About TACEO
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Since the dawn of the internet, organizations have faced a painful trade鈥憃ff: protect sensitive information or unlock its value through collaboration. Data needed to stay private, but innovation required sharing it. For decades, privacy and progress couldn鈥檛 truly coexist. TACEO eliminates that compromise, proving that privacy and collaboration can, at last, go hand in hand.
At the heart of TACEO is a breakthrough called Private Shared State (PSS), a first鈥憃f鈥慽ts鈥慿ind foundation for secure data science. PSS keeps data permanently encrypted, enabling multiple parties to compute, audit, and verify together without ever exposing the underlying information.
PSS is powered by a tool called coSNARKs, a new cryptographic tool that combines two advanced techniques:
Multiparty Computation (MPC): lets organizations compute together on encrypted 鈥渟hares鈥� of their data, without revealing their individual inputs
Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP): allows them to prove results are true without revealing what鈥檚 inside
The result is a platform for trust and verifiability at scale, with broad applications across finance, crypto, AI and beyond.
Real world impact:
TACEO鈥檚 technology is already being deployed by some of the biggest names in Web3:
Sam Altman鈥檚 World (formerly Worldcoin): in 2023, TACEO was tasked with building software for the world鈥檚 largest encrypted-yet-verifiable database, processing the iris data of 14 million World users.
Aztec Network: TACEO transformed Aztec鈥檚 encrypted Ethereum Layer 2 from a single-user to a multi鈥憄arty model, enabling true collaborative privacy.
In finance, PSS solves one of blockchain鈥檚 hardest problems 鈥� open transparency versus confidential business logic. Privacy concerns have been a major barrier to the mainstream adoption of decentralised finance (DeFi). As blockchain transactions are public, any institution using it to pay salaries or manage sensitive transactions, for example, would expose private data. Meanwhile building private blockchains inhouse is complex, time-consuming and often incompatible with broader infrastructure. With PSS, DeFi finally has a solution: confidential trading (matching orders without revealing prices or strategies) and verifiable settlement (ensuring trades settle correctly on-chain). This turns privacy from a blocker into an enabler of adoption.
In AI, PSS allows organizations to co鈥憈rain models on combined datasets without compromising proprietary or personal information.
Across Web3, PSS paves the way for the next generation of private, verifiable digital economies..
Founded in 2022 by six cryptographers from Graz University of Technology, TACEO鈥檚 roots lie in deep cryptographic research. The team previously built the Poseidon hash function, now a de facto standard in zero鈥慿nowledge systems, and developed Austria鈥檚 privacy鈥慺irst COVID鈥�19 contact tracing system.
In July 2025, TACEO secured a $5.5 million seed round from leading US VCs a16z (as part of its crypto accelerator CSX) and Archetype – no small feat for an Austrian startup formed just three years earlier. Our mission: to make programmable privacy and trust a foundation of the modern internet, allowing data collaboration without compromise.
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