Thomvest invests in Opaque Systems — from friendship to company-building

Thomvest is thrilled to announce our Series A investment in Opaque Systems, the company behind open source MC2, a platform for collaborative analytics and artificial intelligence ( AI) at scale. Confidential computing is a market that is ready for takeoff — Gartner estimates that by 2025, 60% of large organizations will adopt privacy-enhancing computation (PEC) for processing data in untrusted environments and (multiparty) data analytics use cases. Opaque Systems was founded by an incredible team — Rishabh Poddar, Raluca Ada Popa and Ion Stoica — who have the right skills to solve this incredibly technical challenge.

Our journey with Rishabh, Opaque’s co-founder and CEO started many years ago during his PhD days at UC Berkeley. My interest in one of his published papers led to a memorable early-morning coffee meeting, when he was a member of Berkeley RISELab whose mission is to develop technologies that enable applications to interact intelligently and securely with their environment in real time. Rishabh’s excitement about the confidential computing space is infectious and we knew right away that we had to be a part of his journey whenever he decided to launch his dreamboat. We are thankful that time has arrived!

AI and machine learning (ML) techniques are increasingly being adopted by enterprises today to make business-critical decisions. For continued accuracy, machine learning needs a large amount of data which today is stuck in organizational silos. Sharing confidential data is a bottleneck for large enterprises in regulated industries who want to (Read more...)