Iris-Scanner Pioneer Locks $5.5M Seed Funding—Biometric Boom or Bubble?

Eyeball-tech just got a cash injection. The world's leading iris-scanner developer just secured $5.5 million in seed funding—because apparently, passwords are so 2020.

Why eyeballs beat blockchain (this week)

While crypto bros were busy chasing memecoins, this stealthy biometrics play quietly convinced investors that retinal scans might actually solve something. The round closed faster than a blink—$5.5 million proves someone thinks our eyeballs are the next 'hot wallet.'

The cynical take

Let's be real: VCs will fund anything that sounds like sci-fi these days. But unlike most Web3 vaporware, this tech at least has airports and governments already writing checks. Still, remember Theranos? Exactly.

What is TACEO?

Established in 2022, TACEO was founded by a team of developers from Graz University of Technology. The team’s first official project was the Poseidon hash function. During the pandemic, the team came up with a system that could track COVID-19 infection spreads.

The Austria-based company is mostly known for its ability to build software that enables multiple parties to collaborate on sensitive data without having to expose underlying information or conform to centralized trust.

In 2023, it partnered with Sam Altman’s World (WLD) to build software for its iris matching verification service used to give access to the World network. However, the software sparked public backlash over privacy concerns due to suspicion over the platform collecting iris-scans.

This led to the project being banned in Indonesia, Brazil and Hong Kong, with government officials probing the project for collecting and storing individual face and iris information.

Despite this fact, TACEO claims that the solution fully encrypts biometric data of over 14 million of its users, making it inaccessible to even the World team. The database is the largest Multiparty Computation-secured dataset on public record.