Opaque

Opaque is a company developing a cloud-based service for secure analytics and machine learning on encrypted data. Opaque's mission is to unlock the high-growth market of confidential computing across a number of industries (manufacturing, finance, adtech, healthcare, insurance, etc.) through a "Confidential AI platform." Opaque aims to enable secure collaboration, analytics, and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) on confidential data stored in trusted execution environments (TEEs). TEEs improve security by preventing the unauthorized modification of the data while it is in use. Opaque's platform allows customers to train models in a public cloud on data that is encrypted during the training process. Users can upload data or connect to sources, set policies to govern data and computation, and then establish confidential workspaces across their teams.

The following are use cases for Opaque's platform:

• Data sharing—Multiple data owners can upload encrypted data to the cloud and jointly analyze the collective data while retaining full control over how it is used, addressing privacy issues, regulatory requirements, and competitive concerns.
• Data clean rooms—Multiple parties can store and process data without exposing confidential information with Opaque's multiple layers of security, including data encryption throughout the data lifecycle (even when in use).
• Multi-party analytics—Users can securely share encrypted data for collaborative analytics and machine learning, ensuring each party can only view data and insights they are authorized to see.
• AI & machine learning—Opaque's platform enables secure machine learning, LLMs, and AI directly on encrypted data within enclaves. Businesses can keep their data safe across the lifecycle, including model training, fine-tuning, and inference.

Based in San Francisco, Opaque was spun out from the UC Berkeley RISELab in January 2021. Founders include Professor Raluca Ada Popa (President), Dr. Rishabh Poddar (CTO & Former CEO), Professor Wenting Zheng (Chief Scientist), Chester Leung (Principal Engineer), and Professor Ion Stoica who previously founded Databricks. The cofounders developed technology that would go on to be used by Opaque while working on the MC² (Multiparty Collaboration and Competition) open-source project at UC Berkeley’s RISELab. MC² is a Spark-based framework for running secure analytics and machine learning on encrypted data. It consists of an assortment of sub-components enabling multiple data owners to perform analytics and jointly train machine learning models on their collective data without revealing their data to each other.

On July 7, 2021, Opaque raised $9.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Intel Capital with participation from Race Capital, The House Fund, and FactoryHQ. On June 18, 2022, Opaque announced a $22 million Series A funding round led by Walden Catalyst Partners with participation from Storm Ventures, Thomvest Ventures, Intel Capital, Race Capital, The House Fund and FactoryHQ. Aaron Fulkerson became CEO of the company in October 2023, with cofounder Rishabh Poddar becoming CTO.