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Opaque, a new startup born out of Berkely’s RISELabs, today announced a $ 9.5 million funding round to create a solution to securely access and work with sensitive data in the cloud, even with several organizations involved. Intel Capital led today’s investment with participation from Race Capital, The House Fund and FactoryHQ.
The company helps its clients to work with secure data in the cloud while ensuring that the data they are working on is not exposed to cloud providers, other research participants or anyone else, said the president of the company, Raluca Ada Popa.
“What we’re doing is using this very exciting hardware mechanism called the Enclave, which [operates] at the bottom of the processor – it’s a physical black box – and is only decrypted there. […] So even if someone has administrative privileges in the cloud, they can only see the encrypted data, ”she explained.
Company co-founder Ion Stoica, who was co-founder of Databricks, says the startup’s solution helps resolve two conflicting trends. On the one hand, companies increasingly want to use data, but at the same time, they see a growing trend towards privacy protection. Opaque is designed to solve this problem by allowing customers to access their data in a secure and fully encrypted manner.
The company describes the solution as “a new combination of two key technologies layered on top of cutting-edge cloud security: secure hardware enclaves and cryptographic fortification.” This allows customers to work with data, for example to create machine learning models, without exposing the data to others, while still generating meaningful results.
Popa says it could be useful for hospitals working together on cancer research, who want to find better treatment options without exposing patient data from a given hospital to other hospitals, or banks to the money laundering research without exposing customer data to other banks, as a couple of examples.
Investors were likely drawn to the pedigree of Popa, professor of computer security and applied cryptography at UC Berkeley and Stoica, who is also a professor at Berkeley and co-founder of Databricks. Both helped found RISELabs in Berkeley, where they developed the solution and turned it into a business.
Mark Rostick, vice president and senior general manager of lead investor Intel Capital, says his company has worked with the founders since the startup’s early days, recognizing the potential of this solution to help companies find even complex solutions. when multiple organizations are involved in sharing sensitive data. The data.
“Businesses are struggling to find value in data across silos due to privacy and other concerns. Confidential IT unlocks the full potential of data by allowing organizations to extract information from sensitive data while seamlessly moving data to the cloud without compromising security or privacy, ”Rostick said in a statement. .
He added, “Opaque bridges the gap between data security and the scale and economy of the cloud, enabling inter-organizational and intra-organizational collaboration. “
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