Across Europe, financial institutions, defence agencies, and public administrations all face the same dilemma. Strict privacy rules protect citizens’ data, but they also limit how that data can be used to train or run artificial intelligence systems. Wodan AI, a young Spanish-Belgian startup, believes it has found a way out of that gridlock.
Its technology enables machine learning, Computer Vision, and Large Language Models to operate directly on encrypted data, allowing organisations to use AI while keeping information completely private. By eliminating the need to decrypt sensitive data, Wodan AI offers a path to secure, sovereign AI infrastructure aligned with European regulations and values.
The company has closed a €2 million pre-seed round, led by JME Ventures, Swanlaab, and Adara Ventures, with Belgium’s ScaleFund also joining. The new funds will strengthen Wodan AI’s technology base, expand its R&D team, and help it meet the growing demand for privacy-preserving AI across the continent.
Making AI not only powerful but also trustworthy
Bob Dubois and Manuel Pérez Yllán created Wodan AI, which faced the same frustration: the most sophisticated AI models were off-limits to industries that held sensitive data.
At the core of Wodan AI’s platform, homomorphic encryption is a cryptographic method that enables computations to be performed directly on encrypted data. In practice, it means an AI model can analyze, learn, or predict outcomes without ever seeing the actual data. The concept has been studied for years, but applying it effectively to large-scale AI workloads has remained a technical challenge.
This is what differentiates the company from global players such as Duality Technologies, Zama, and Cape Privacy, which also explore privacy-preserving computation. Wodan AI’s focus on real-time performance, integration with existing enterprise AI systems, and full alignment with European data protection standards give it a unique position in the market.
The company is already testing its technology through pilot projects with a major Spanish financial institution, marking one of the first real-world deployments of encrypted AI at an enterprise level.
What’s next?
With fresh capital secured, Wodan AI is relocating its global headquarters to Madrid and consolidating its R&D operations in Spain. “Spain has the technical talent required to develop critical sovereign AI technologies. With our headquarters, R&D centre and team growth in Madrid, we aim to consolidate a European hub of reference in private, secure AI designed for the most demanding sectors,” says Manuel Pérez Yllan, CTO and co-founder of Wodan AI.
“At Swanlaab, we invest in teams capable of driving the next technological wave. Wodan AI is building an essential layer of infrastructure to ensure that enterprise AI adoption is secure, reliable and scalable. Their technology delivers immediate value and has the potential to become a standard,” adds Juan Revuelta, Partner at Swanlaab.
