PwC Raise | Ventures advises Secretarium on £5m seed funding round from IQ Capital

The PwC Raise | Ventures team is pleased to announce that it has supported the award winning privacy technology company Secretarium in securing its £5m seed round from IQ Capital.

The deal has the potential to transform the way businesses and organisations manage sensitive data. Secretarium's unique privacy-enhancing technology combines cryptography and secure hardware. It fully protects data, even during processing, a new capability in this field. Its technology has already been proven in applications including financial data reconciliation, trading platforms, document escrow, digital currencies and custody of digital assets.

The seed raise follows a number of high-profile awards that Secretarium scooped recently, including “Most innovative use of distributed ledger technology” and “Most innovative financial data security solution” at the 2021 A-Team Innovation Awards. The London-based company was also part of one of the three winning teams in the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Global CBDC challenge, seeing off over 300 submissions from more than 50 countries. The winning solution was noted for its 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. 

The investment from IQ capital will fund the growth of the team whilst enabling the technology to be rolled out in other sectors where the requirement to process data without compromising privacy is essential.

The PwC team advising on the deal were Cara Haffey, Charlie Robinson and Thomas Hudson.

Charlie Robinson, PwC Raise | Ventures Programmes Lead, said:

“We’re delighted to have worked with Secretarium on this chapter of their fundraising journey and supported the founding team to find the right investor at this round. It’s been exciting to see what Bertrand, Cedric and the team are building in the confidential computing and privacy-enhancing technology space. IQ Capital will make a fantastic partner as they scale the business and we look forward to seeing their continued growth.”

Bertrand Foing, Co-founder & CEO of Sectretarium, said:

“We have enjoyed great guidance from the PwC Raise | Ventures programme team, helping to make us investor-ready in just a few weeks and advising us through the entire fundraising journey.”

Cedric Wahl, Co-founder & CTO of Secretarium, said:

“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, said:

“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.”