Opaque Raises $9.5M Seed Funding - Data Security

Opaque Secures Cloud Data Access with $9.5 Million Seed Funding

A new company, Opaque, originating from UC Berkeley’s RISELab, has announced the successful completion of a $9.5 million seed funding round. This investment will be utilized to develop a secure solution for accessing and collaborating on sensitive data within cloud environments, even when multiple organizations are involved.

Investment Details

Intel Capital spearheaded the investment, with further participation from Race Capital, The House Fund, and FactoryHQ. This backing demonstrates strong confidence in Opaque’s innovative approach to data security.

Protecting Data Integrity

Opaque’s core function is to empower customers to work with secure data in the cloud without exposing it to cloud providers, research collaborators, or unauthorized parties, according to company president Raluca Ada Popa.

The technology leverages a hardware-based security feature known as an Enclave. This operates as a secure, physically isolated environment within the processor itself, ensuring data remains encrypted even with full administrative access to the cloud infrastructure.

Addressing Conflicting Trends

Co-founder Ion Stoica, also a Databricks co-founder, highlights that Opaque addresses a growing tension. Businesses are increasingly driven to utilize data for insights, yet simultaneously face heightened concerns regarding data privacy.

Opaque is engineered to reconcile these competing needs by providing secure and fully encrypted data access, enabling valuable data utilization without compromising confidentiality.

Core Technology: Secure Enclaves and Cryptographic Fortification

The company’s solution is described as a unique integration of secure hardware enclaves and cryptographic fortification, built upon existing cloud security measures.

This allows customers to perform data-intensive tasks, such as building machine learning models, without revealing the underlying data to external entities, while still achieving meaningful and accurate results.

Real-World Applications

Popa illustrates potential applications in sectors like healthcare and finance. Hospitals could collaborate on cancer research, improving treatment options without sharing patient data. Banks could detect money laundering patterns without exposing customer financial information to competitors.

Founders’ Expertise

Investors were drawn to the strong academic and entrepreneurial backgrounds of Popa, a professor of computer security and applied crypto at UC Berkeley, and Stoica, a Berkeley professor and Databricks co-founder.

Both founders played key roles in establishing RISELabs at Berkeley, where the foundational technology was developed and subsequently spun out into Opaque.

Intel Capital’s Perspective

Mark Rostick, vice president and senior managing director at Intel Capital, stated that his firm has been engaged with the founders since the project’s inception, recognizing the potential of the solution.

He emphasized that confidential computing unlocks the full value of data by enabling organizations to derive insights from sensitive information while seamlessly migrating data to the cloud without sacrificing security or privacy.

Rostick concluded that Opaque effectively bridges the gap between robust data security and the scalability and cost-effectiveness of cloud computing, fostering both internal and external data collaboration.