Taceo CEO sees market for distributed biometrics processing coming together

Austria-based Taceo is best-known as the company that provides the privacy-preserving infrastructure that enables World to process user’s biometrics with multi-party computation to generate zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs). Lukas Helminger, co-founder and CEO of Taceo, tells Biometric Update in an email interview that the same technology can be used for any organization that needs to perform identity verification without revealing sensitive data.

“The challenge is doing that without any party ever seeing the raw biometric data – including World itself” in the case of Taceo’s most famous partnership.

The Taceo Network in underpinned by Private Shared State (PSS) cryptography, which combines MPCs and ZKPs.

“MPC allows multiple parties to compute on shared inputs so that no single participant ever has full visibility of the entire data set, while ZKPs enable a party to prove a claim without revealing the underlying data,” Helminger explains.

Taceo was founded in 2022 by a team at the Graz University of Technology’s Institute of Information Security (ISEC), and won a community grant from World back in 2024, when it was still known as Worldcoin. The companies launched the anonymized multi-party computation system built from their partnership a year ago. Then the startup raised $5.5 million in seed funding last August to grow its team and scale its technology.

‘A market is forming’

Deepfakes and other sophisticated forms of identity fraud have prompted widespread uptake of stronger methods of identity assurance, like biometrics, even as attackers have found ways to leverage similar technologies to break into the honey-pots of valuable data that traditional approaches to IDV and authentication relying on centralized databases create. The best way to avoid mass breaches of sensitive data, Helminger argues, is to avoid these databases.

“The ability to verify that someone is a real, unique human without building a centralized biometric database, is something many businesses will need at the architecture level rather than as an afterthought.”

The “proof of human” solution Taceo built for World ID can also work as a model for other organizations that need to perform KYC checks, age verification or confirmation of residency. Organizations use Taceo’s infrastructure to produce cryptographic proofs from encrypted inputs without exposing identity data.

MCP for privacy-preserving biometrics has also been championed by influential voices in the industry like Anonybit Founder Frances Zelazny. Anonybit’s website shut down earlier this year, and company executives have found other roles.

But according to Helminger, “Anonybit didn’t really close, its founder took the privacy-preserving biometrics work to Prove, which counts nine of the top ten U.S. banks as customers.”

“When an incumbent of that size commits this to its roadmap, it’s a clear indicator that the commercial demand is real,” he adds. Helminger believes that the recent push by World into enterprise applications, including partnerships with Zoom and DocuSign, “is further evidence that a market is forming.”

That creates a golden opportunity for Taceo to provide the infrastructure for a new wave of solutions to address the demand for the certainty of biometrics without the risk of centralized databases or processing.

“Taceo’s technology sits beneath all of this. While front-end brands will come and go, the privacy infrastructure layer that we have built to run checks across organizations is the part that remains and offers the real value,” says Helminger. “Others work to store biometric data more safely inside a single company. Instead, we run biometric computation across independent operators, so no single party — including us – ever holds the full dataset. Demand is rising, and more and more teams are approaching us to onboard them onto MPC-based privacy-preserving biometric checks.”

Article Topics

biometrics  |  data privacy  |  data protection  |  multi-party computation  |  Taceo  |  World ID  |  ZKP cryptography