OPAQUE, the Confidential AI company headquartered in San Francisco and founded by researchers from UC Berkeley’s RISELab, has acquired advanced cryptographic AI technologies from the Technology Innovation Institute, the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council. The acquisition marks the first time cryptographic AI technologies developed in the UAE have been acquired and deployed at scale by a U.S.-based technology company.
The acquired technology adds two critical capabilities to OPAQUE’s platform: confidential AI model training powered by multi-party computation and fully homomorphic encryption, and post-quantum cryptographic protections. The acquisition follows OPAQUE’s $24 million Series B at a $300 million valuation and builds on a customer base that includes ServiceNow, Anthropic, Accenture, and Encore Capital. With the integration, OPAQUE supports confidential AI workflows across training, fine-tuning, inference, and agents, moving enterprises from isolated experiments to production deployment four to five times faster.
KEY QUOTES:
“The future of AI depends on unlocking the data organizations have never been able to touch. Most enterprises sit on a corpus of data too sensitive to use and too valuable to ignore. With this acquisition, OPAQUE is the only platform delivering hardware-attested cryptographic evidence across the full AI lifecycle — training, fine-tuning, inference, and agents — with protections engineered to withstand quantum-era threats.”
Ion Stoica, Co-Founder, OPAQUE
“AI agents are extraordinarily powerful. That same power is exactly why they are so difficult to move into production. The only way to safely deploy them is with hardware-enforced, verifiable rules: provable evidence of what ran, where it ran, and which rules were enforced.”
Aaron Fulkerson, Chief Executive Officer, OPAQUE
“Cryptographic AI capabilities developed in Abu Dhabi are now being deployed at global scale by a leading US technology company. The UAE is not only adopting the AI economy — we are leading.”
H.E. Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary General, ATRC
“We developed these cryptographic technologies to address a fundamental challenge in AI: how to enable powerful models to work with highly sensitive data without compromising confidentiality or trust. OPAQUE was the right partner to bring this to market because it has already built the enterprise platform and customer base to deploy it at scale.”
Dr. Najwa Aaraj, Chief Executive Officer, Technology Innovation Institute
