The announcement that Opaque acquired Abu Dhabi cryptographic artificial intelligence (AI) tech from the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) was amplified at this week’s Make it in the Emirates event in Abu Dhabi. The move underscores the journey of Abu Dhabi-developed technology from UAE laboratories to international deployment, and reinforcing the country’s growing role as a producer of advanced technologies built in the UAE and adopted globally.
Make it in the Emirates, the UAE’s flagship industrial and advanced technology event, brings together government entities, technology leaders, manufacturers, investors and startups to showcase the country’s ambitions to position itself as a global hub for innovation, industrial transformation and sovereign technology development.
Confidential AI company Opaque announced the acquisition of advanced cryptographic AI technologies from TII, the applied research arm of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC).
TII has emerged as one of the UAE’s leading research institutions, focusing on AI, cryptography, quantum technologies, advanced materials and autonomous systems. The organisation has gained international visibility through projects such as the Falcon large language model (LLM) family and its work on privacy-preserving and sovereign AI technologies.
The acquisition adds two major capabilities to Opaque’s confidential AI platform: confidential AI model training using advanced cryptographic techniques such as multi-party computation (MPC) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), as well as post-quantum cryptographic protections designed to withstand future quantum computing threats.
According to the companies, the acquired technologies have already been validated in real-world use cases and will extend Opaque’s capabilities across the entire AI lifecycle, including training, fine-tuning, inference and AI agent execution.
The companies described the deal as the first time cryptographic AI technologies developed in the UAE have been acquired and deployed at scale by a US-based technology company.
“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 UAE President His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and secretary general of ATRC. “Cryptographic AI capabilities developed in Abu Dhabi are now being deployed at a global scale by a leading US technology company.”
Ion Stoica, co-founder and board member of Opaque, said the future of enterprise AI depends on enabling organisations to safely use highly sensitive data that has traditionally remained inaccessible to AI systems because of security and compliance concerns. “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.”
The platform is designed to address one of the biggest barriers preventing enterprise AI adoption at scale: the inability to securely use highly sensitive datasets across multiple AI workflows without relying on fragmented security tools from multiple suppliers.
Opaque said existing customers include ServiceNow, Anthropic, Accenture and Encore Capital, while the acquisition follows the company’s recent US$24m Series B funding round at a reported valuation of US$300m.
For ATRC and TII, the deal represents a broader validation of the UAE’s strategy to invest in foundational AI and cryptography research and commercialise those technologies globally through international 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 Najwa Aaraj, CEO of TII. “This is what applied research is for, foundational technology developed in Abu Dhabi, now moving from the lab into real-world global deployment.”
