World’s iris-scanner builder secures $5.5m in seed funding round

TACEO announced that it has completed a $5.5 million seed funding round led by Archetype VC, which included a16z and other major firms. What will the funds be used for?

Summary

• The startup behind World’s iris-scanning encryption software has completed a $5.5 million seed funding round.
• World’s iris-scanning verification has received backlash from several countries that speculate the safety of the data.

According to the press release sent to crypto.news, the capital raised from the funding round will be used to form a team and scale technology aimed at expanding the firm’s utility beyond just crypto and decentralized finance.

With the funding, the team aims to explore other fields that require the use of technology that can safeguard sensitive information and ensure privacy. Potentially, it plans to dive into identity verification, financial services, and AI.

The seed funding round was led by Archetype VC with participation from major firms including a16z CSX, Cyber.Fund, A.Capital Ventures, Polymorphic Capital, and several prominent angel investors.

The company has been developing what is called a “Private Shared State.” The model is powered by a cryptographic tool called coSNARKs which combines data protection during computation through Multiparty Computation and outcome proving via Zero-Knowledge Proofs.

What is TACEO?

Established in 2022, TACEO was founded by a team of developers from Graz University of Technology. The team’s first official project was the Poseidon hash function. During the pandemic, the team came up with a system that could track COVID-19 infection spreads.

The Austria-based company is mostly known for its ability to build software that enables multiple parties to collaborate on sensitive data without having to expose underlying information or conform to centralized trust.

In 2023, it partnered with Sam Altman’s World (WLD) to build software for its iris matching verification service used to give access to the World network. However, the software sparked public backlash over privacy concerns due to suspicion over the platform collecting iris-scans.

This led to the project being banned in Indonesia, Brazil and Hong Kong, with government officials probing the project for collecting and storing individual face and iris information.

Despite this fact, TACEO claims that the solution fully encrypts biometric data of over 14 million of its users, making it inaccessible to even the World team. The database is the largest Multiparty Computation-secured dataset on public record.