Secretarium receives £5m Seed investment from IQ Capital and emerges from stealth mode

• Confidential computing start-up, Secretarium, backed by ‘transformative deeptech’ investors IQ Capital
• Award-winning privacy tech introduces new generation DLT that can fully protect data, even during processing 
• £5m Seed round investment to grow the team and scale technology over the next two years

LONDON, United Kingdom – 28th February 2022 – Secretarium today announced an investment of £5 million led by  IQ Capital. The seed funding will enable the deeptech start-up to scale its award-winning confidential computing technology.

Secretarium’s unique privacy-enhancing technology combines cryptography and secure hardware. It fully protects data, even during processing, a new capability in the field of deeptech that opens up many exciting possibilities for all industries that deal with sensitive data. It offers neutrality via a trustworthy platform that guarantees integrity through tamper-proof ledgers.

The unique new technology has already been proven in applications including financial data reconciliation, trading platforms, document escrow, digital currencies and custody of digital assets. This investment will enable it to be rolled out in other sectors where the requirement to process data without compromising privacy is essential. 

The investment from IQ Capital will fund the growth of the Secretarium team, which already includes a head of engineering with over 30 years experience and two PhDs from Imperial College London. New hires will be working to scale Secretarium’s privacy-preserving platform capabilities. 

The two founders, Bertand Foing and Cédric Wahl, come from the world of investment banking and derivatives, where they had previously set up a Blockchain Lab before branching out by themselves to create Secretarium- a move spurred by the realisation that blockchain capabilities weren’t sufficient for the level of privacy needed for investment banking. Their expertise in banking meant that some of the company’s first clients were major European banks. 

Amongst other clients, in April 2020, Secretarium received £530,000 funding from Innovate UK to develop a privacy-preserving contact tracing app in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The company sees a key need for confidential computing in the healthcare sector, where it can be used to derive important medical insights from data without ever needing to reveal any confidential information.

Cédric Wahl, Founder and CTO of Secretarium: 

“We started Secretarium because we believe privacy is both a cornerstone of freedom and a business enabler. Our goal is to create a data haven and make Secretarium the safest place on Earth for data, both for individuals and businesses. Not only  that, we also want our technology to be off-the-shelf so that anybody can deploy and run privacy-preserving digital services easily.”

Ed Stacey, Managing Partner at IQ Capital:

“Confidential computing will completely change how data is shared and processed across the internet. It allows applications to consume and share data privately, securely, and only as needed. It offers developers robust privacy, integrity, and application state-finality – key attributes of blockchains – without any of their trade-offs.

The possibilities are endless with confidential computing and will bring huge benefits to a wide range of use-cases: from KYC/AML between banks, to patient-data pooling for improved healthcare, to anonymous reporting such as whistleblowing, to anonymous digital currencies. We’re delighted to be backing the very talented Secretarium founder team, helping to grow their customer base and bringing this pioneering technology to market.”

Secretarium technology was described as ‘ground-breaking’ in the financial trade press after being awarded “Most innovative use of distributed ledger technology” and “Most innovative financial data security solution” at the 2021 A-Team Innovation Awards.

Secretarium was also part of one of the three winning teams in the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Global CBDC challenge. The winning solution, chosen from more than 300 submissions from over 50 countries, was noted for it’s flexibility in supporting anonymity and privacy for small transactions while offering traceability for large transactions for anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism purposes.

CONTACT

media@secretarium.org