enclaive has now secured €4.1 million in seed funding. It was co-led by Join Capital and the Amadeus APEX Technology Fund, with Auriga Cyber Ventures also participating. The new capital will accelerate sales and marketing, expand the capabilities of the Multi Cloud Platform, grow engineering and operations teams, and support the early stages of international expansion. With this round, the company’s total funding accounts for €5.75 million, enclaive disclosed to TFN.
Answer to the “last mile” problem
Berlin-based enclaive enters this landscape with a clear ambition, which makes confidential computing usable without the complexity typically associated with it. Its Multi Cloud Platform (eMCP) allows businesses to run applications in secure enclaves across any cloud provider, ensuring data stays protected end-to-end.
Enterprises don’t need to rewrite code, adjust workflows, or alter tools, a frictionless path that removes one of the biggest blockers to adoption. By encrypting data in use, enclaive removes the need to extend trust to the underlying infrastructure, shifting control fully back to the enterprise.
enclaive added, “With confidential computing, the long-standing challenge of effectively protecting data in all states whilst remaining efficient and without requiring changes to existing operational processes and tools could finally be solved. Having worked for the past decade(s) with clients around the globe who have experienced significant project delays and limitations in their digital innovation due to trust and security risks related to data exposure, this opportunity finally made it possible to build products that overcome these hurdles.”
Founders with expertise in security innovation
Founded in 2022 by Prof. Dr. Sebastian Gajek and Andreas Walbrodt. Sebastian is a professor of cryptography and IT security at Flensburg University. Prior to that, he was a Chief Scientist at NEC, responsible for incubating and transferring groundbreaking security technologies. He holds a PhD from the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security in Germany and was a postdoctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University in Israel. On the other hand, prior to founding enclaive, Andreas held senior positions at IBM and TÜV Rheinland i-Sec, where he led the development and execution of business strategies for cloud and security services.
enclaive has grown into a 20-person team distributed across Berlin and EU countries, building an active community of ISVs, MSPs, and CSPs. Its technology extends Zero Trust principles to the heart of data processing, shielding applications not only from external attackers but also from infrastructure operators and solution providers.
Platform designed for real-world complexity
Where other solutions demand heavy development lift, enclaive takes an operations-first route. The platform supports Kubernetes workloads, virtual machines, and AI applications across multiple cloud environments, all while ensuring vendor independence. Its modular design lets organisations scale securely without being locked into a single ecosystem. With full visibility and control over trust elements, enterprises gain a consistent security posture across providers, a capability especially valuable as multi-cloud strategies become the norm.
What about diversity?
Regarding diversity, enclaive added, “the team is international, with >50% of the team being from outside of Germany, coming from all over the world, from Malaysia to Panama. Given the deep-tech focus, the company is so far predominantly male.”
What sets it apart from other solutions in the market?
As per the company, “enclaive provides software that enables clients to seamlessly create and use 3D-encrypted, trusted execution environments (digital vaults/enclaves) across any current cloud constellation. “3D encrypted” means consistent encryption of data and code across all states: At Rest, In Transit, and, most notably, In Use. Of course, PQ readiness is being supported. The provided solution can be deployed via the enclaive Multi Cloud Confidential Compute Platform (EMCP) in minutes, whilst enabling enterprise clients to use the solution in any configuration they require.”
The modular approach build on the vHSM (virtual High Security Module) that holds the trust elements around attestation, key and secrets as well as the Buckypaper confidential VM allows to combine the elements individually to fit client use cases within the environment of choice, be it the public cloud on hyperscalers like Azure, AWS, GCP, or your individual Datacenter around the corner. It provides a single pane of glass for confidential computing for clients across any infrastructure and its underlying technology.
What’s next?
The aspiration is to establish confidential computing as a widely accepted standard for trusted, secure computing, whilst providing a one-stop shop for quantum-safe, sovereign, and secure confidential computing.
“Cloud adoption has moved faster than trust. As companies push AI and sensitive workloads into multi-cloud environments, they need security guarantees that go beyond policy and perimeter defences,” said Andreas Walbrodt, Co-Founder and CEO of enclaive. “With enclaive, businesses don’t need to trust the cloud – their data, microservices, and AI models are shielded from unauthorised access at every moment. We’re making confidential computing accessible for any organisation, regardless of technical expertise.”
“Confidential computing has existed in academia for years, but remained inaccessible to most organisations. The breakthrough is hardware-based memory encryption that only the CPU can unlock – we’ve built the software layer that makes this technology deployable in days, not months,” added Prof. Dr. Sebastian Gajek, Co-Founder and CTO of enclaive.
“enclaive is the key to unlocking a truly free and private internet,” said Simone Lavizzari, Principal at Join Capital. “While others demand complex integrations, enclaive delivers a ‘zero-code-change’ solution that scales. This is the breakthrough in confidential computing that AI needs to go mainstream and enclaive is the clear frontrunner to become the default confidential layer for the industry.”
“Confidential computing represents the solution to a 40-year-old security challenge – creating an unhackable black box where data remains encrypted even during processing,” said Ion Hauer, Principal at APEX Ventures. “The timing is critical. With regulations such as the US Cloud Act, which allow authorities to demand data from servers regardless of location, European organisations face a sovereignty dilemma. Confidential computing offers a technical solution to this political challenge: even if data is demanded, it remains encrypted and inaccessible. This is infrastructure-level security that the market urgently needs.”
