Company: TACEO
CEO: Lukas Helminger, Daniel Kales (CTO), Roman Walch (Lead Cryptographer), Lukas Götz (CPO), Stefan Plank (COO), Christian Rechberger (Chief Scientist).
Website: https://taceo.io
About TACEO
Tell us about your company (Max 500 words):
Since the dawn of the internet, organizations have faced a painful trade‑off: 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’t 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‑of‑its‑kind 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 “shares” of their data, without revealing their individual inputs
Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP): allows them to prove results are true without revealing what’s 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’s technology is already being deployed by some of the biggest names in Web3:
Sam Altman’s World (formerly Worldcoin): in 2023, TACEO was tasked with building software for the world’s largest encrypted-yet-verifiable database, processing the iris data of 14 million World users.
Aztec Network: TACEO transformed Aztec’s encrypted Ethereum Layer 2 from a single-user to a multi‑party model, enabling true collaborative privacy.
In finance, PSS solves one of blockchain’s hardest problems — 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‑train 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’s roots lie in deep cryptographic research. The team previously built the Poseidon hash function, now a de facto standard in zero‑knowledge systems, and developed Austria’s privacy‑first COVID‑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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