OPAQUE Systems

The story of Opaque Systems begins not in a corporate boardroom, but within the innovative halls of the UC Berkeley RISELab—the same renowned research laboratory that gave birth to transformative technologies like Apache Spark and Databricks. It was here that a team of brilliant researchers, including Ion Stoica and Raluca Ada Popa, identified a critical paradox in the modern data landscape: while organizations possessed vast troves of valuable data, the most sensitive and impactful portions remained locked away, inaccessible for analytics and AI due to strict privacy and regulatory constraints.

Driven by a mission to solve this 'data utility vs. data privacy' dilemma, the team developed and open-sourced the MC2 platform, a breakthrough in secure multi-party computation. Recognizing the immense commercial potential of this technology, they founded Opaque Systems in 2019. Their vision was to create a platform that would allow enterprises to perform collaborative analytics and machine learning directly on encrypted data, without ever exposing the underlying information—even to the cloud providers hosting it.

Today, Opaque Systems has evolved into a leading Confidential AI platform. By leveraging advanced hardware-enforced security known as 'enclaves,' the company empowers organizations to unlock their most sensitive data for the next generation of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs). With the appointment of Aaron Fulkerson as CEO in 2023 and significant Series A funding, Opaque continues to bridge the gap between data privacy and AI innovation, enabling a future where data can be both shared and secure.