When Sam Altman's World needs to verify that a new user's iris hasn't already been registered, it faces a peculiar problem. The computation has to happen on encrypted data, all the way through.
That is what the Austrian startup TACEO has been building since 2022. On Thursday, the Graz-based company announced the launch of the TACEO Network, a private execution layer for shared digital infrastructure covering identity, finance, and AI agents, and revealed that its cryptographic infrastructure is already live inside World ID, handling biometric verification for more than 18 million users across 160 countries.
The problem TACEO is addressing is structural. Organisations increasingly want to participate in shared digital systems, common payment rails, interoperable identity networks, multi-party financial workflows, but cannot afford to expose the sensitive parts of those workflows to other participants or to a central operator.
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The usual workaround is to keep the sensitive processing in-house: an internal system handles the identity checks, the fraud scoring, the routing logic, while everything else runs on shared infrastructure.
That concentrates risk, multiplies compliance headaches, and means the benefits of shared systems never fully materialise.
TACEO's answer is a private execution layer that sits beneath shared infrastructure. The underlying technology combines two advanced cryptographic approaches. Multiparty Computation, MPC, allows multiple nodes to jointly compute a function on encrypted data without any single node ever seeing the unencrypted inputs.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs allow a party to prove that a computation was carried out correctly without revealing what the data actually was. TACEO combines both into what it calls coSNARKs: collaborative SNARKs that let distributed nodes not only process encrypted data together but generate a verifiable proof that they did so correctly. The result is computation that is both private and auditable.
TACEO was founded in 2022 by a team of cryptography researchers from Graz University of Technology. CEO Lukas Helminger was a cryptography researcher and lecturer there and a contributor to the Austrian Defence Department.
The team's academic credentials are substantial: co-founder and Chief Scientist Christian Rechberger is a professor at TU Graz and co-designer of the Poseidon hash function, now a de facto standard in zero-knowledge cryptography systems.
The company also raised a $5.5 million seed round in July 2025, led by Archetype VC, with participation from a16z CSX, the crypto accelerator arm of Andreessen Horowitz, which TACEO joined in 2024.
The TACEO Network is operated by a distributed set of node operators including Nethermind, a well-known Ethereum infrastructure company, and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Czech Technical University in Prague.
Nodes run across the US, Europe, and Asia, according to the company. The distributed node architecture is central to the security model: because no single operator controls the full computation, no single actor, including TACEO itself, can access the underlying data.
“For decades we've had to choose between two models: either sensitive data stays private inside one organisation, or it becomes visible in shared systems,” said Helminger in a statement. “With the launch of the TACEO Network, that trade-off starts to disappear. Computation can run across independent operators while the data itself stays encrypted.”
The 18 million user figure cited in the launch is an update from the 14 million cited at the time of the July 2025 seed round, suggesting continued growth in World ID's deployed base.
The 18 million and 160 countries figures come from TACEO's press materials and have not been independently verified, though the direction of growth is consistent with World's public expansion trajectory.
The broader ambition extends well beyond biometrics. As stablecoins push digital settlement towards the mainstream and AI agents create new machine-to-machine use cases, the need for shared digital rails that can handle sensitive logic without centralising it is growing.
TACEO's argument is that its private execution layer is the missing infrastructure piece, the layer that lets financial institutions, identity providers, and AI systems coordinate on shared networks without handing control of sensitive data to a single party.
Whether that argument translates into enterprise adoption at scale is the question the TACEO Network now has to answer.