OPAQUE, a Confidential AI company headquartered in San Francisco, has announced the acquisition of advanced cryptographic AI technologies from the Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC). With this strategic move, OPAQUE strengthens its platform by adding two critical capabilities: confidential AI model training powered by advanced cryptographic methods such as multi-party computation and fully homomorphic encryption, along with post-quantum cryptographic protections.

Notably, this acquisition marks a significant milestone, as it is the first time AI-driven cryptographic technologies developed in the UAE have been acquired and deployed at scale by a US-based technology company. Furthermore, the integration of these technologies enables OPAQUE to expand its Confidential AI workflows across the entire lifecycle, including training, fine-tuning, inference, and AI agent execution. As a result, enterprises can accelerate their transition from isolated AI experiments to full-scale production deployments up to four to five times faster.

The acquisition was overseen by H.E. Faisal Al Bannai and Ion Stoica, reflecting strong collaboration between global research and enterprise technology leaders. Consequently, this partnership highlights the growing importance of international cooperation in advancing trusted AI innovation.

“This acquisition reflects what the UAE has set out to do produce foundational technology that the world adopts,” said H.E. Faisal Al Bannai, Adviser to the UAE President and Secretary General of ATRC. “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. ATRC will continue to invest in the research that defines the next generation of trusted AI.”

In addition, OPAQUE’s platform now delivers hardware-attested cryptographic evidence across the full AI lifecycle. This ensures that sensitive enterprise data remains protected while enabling advanced AI capabilities. Importantly, the platform incorporates protections designed to withstand emerging quantum-era threats, positioning it ahead of current market offerings.

“The future of AI depends on unlocking the data organizations have never been able to touch,” said Ion Stoica, Co-Founder of OPAQUE. “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. That combination doesn’t exist anywhere else in the market today.”

Moreover, the growing adoption of AI agents introduces both opportunities and risks, especially when dealing with sensitive or regulated data. Therefore, OPAQUE emphasizes the need for verifiable, hardware-enforced controls to ensure safe deployment.

“AI agents are extraordinarily powerful: they operate at machine speed with human-like capabilities, delivering in days what entire teams would struggle to complete in a year,” said Aaron Fulkerson, Chief Executive Officer of OPAQUE. “That same power is exactly why they are so difficult to move into production. An agent connected to sensitive systems or regulated data patient records, clinical research, financial claims can do damage in days that a team of malicious actors couldn’t match in a year. 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. Building on primitives from every major cloud provider, OPAQUE makes it possible to move agents into production even on the most sensitive and most regulated systems and data.”

Traditionally, enterprises have struggled to leverage sensitive data across AI workflows due to fragmented tools and compliance concerns. However, OPAQUE addresses this challenge by delivering a unified platform that eliminates gaps between training, inference, and agent operations. Consequently, organizations gain verifiable guarantees at every stage, supported by post-quantum cryptography and hardware-based security mechanisms.

Additionally, OPAQUE’s architecture ensures that data protection is rooted in Trusted Execution Environments, rather than relying on vendor trust. This approach enables organizations, including sovereign AI programs, to maintain strict data residency and regulatory compliance while leveraging advanced AI capabilities. For example, enterprises can securely train models on sensitive datasets, run inference across distributed systems, and deploy AI agents all within a single, compliant platform.

The acquisition also aligns with OPAQUE’s recent growth trajectory, including its $24 million Series B funding round and expanding customer base featuring leading enterprises. By integrating TII’s cryptographic innovations, OPAQUE continues to strengthen its position as a leader in Confidential AI, delivering scalable, secure, and future-ready solutions.

Finally, the collaboration underscores TII and ATRC’s long-term strategy of developing foundational AI technologies and scaling them globally through strategic partnerships.

“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,” said Dr. Najwa Aaraj, Chief Executive Officer of TII. “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. This is what applied research is for — foundational technology developed in Abu Dhabi, now moving from the lab into real-world global deployment.”

Source- PR Newswire

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