Opaque Systems Appoints Aaron Fulkerson as Chief Executive Officer

A momentous year for the Confidential Computing company continues with new executive hire and launch of Large Language Model privacy layer, OpaquePrompts

October 26, 2023 09:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Opaque Systems, the leader in privacy-enhancing technologies for data and AI, today announced the appointment of Aaron Fulkerson as Chief Executive Officer. Fulkerson joins Opaque with enterprise and open-source software expertise and decades of experience growing and scaling technology companies. Most recently, he launched ServiceNow Impact, a new software category providing AI-enabled value acceleration for ServiceNow customers, where he served as Vice President and General Manager. At Opaque, he will spearhead the company’s go-to-market initiatives to continue unlocking the value of confidential computing and propel Opaque into its next stage of growth.

“As a co-founder of Opaque Systems, I’ve seen firsthand the challenges companies face when attempting to protect their sensitive and confidential data”Post this

“The two most important macro-technology trends today are privacy, and data and AI. Opaque makes creating a layer of verifiable privacy easy, giving companies control over their data security without sacrificing the benefits of data analytics or AI,” said Aaron Fulkerson, Chief Executive Officer of Opaque Systems. “It’s an honor to join this team of world-class researchers and engineers. They are many of the world’s foremost experts in Confidential Computing, and they’ve solved a tough problem: verifiable privacy for data and AI. I’m excited to help Opaque deliver this much needed transformative tech to the world.”

Former Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Rishabh Poddar will drive Opaque’s technical and product vision as Chief Technology Officer, delivering privacy-enhancing technologies that blend consumer-grade experience with military-grade cryptography.

Poddar co-founded Opaque alongside Raluca Ada Popa, Wenting Zheng, Chester Leung, and Ion Stoica (co-founder of Databricks) in the UC Berkeley RISELab. Together they created, incubated and open-sourced the breakthrough invention, MC2. Its success drove the team to start Opaque and pioneer the first-ever Confidential AI solution for multi-party and inter-company collaborative analytics. Today, Opaque offers a toolkit for unlocking verifiable trust, secure collaboration and control in the digital world.

“As a co-founder of Opaque Systems, I’ve seen firsthand the challenges companies face when attempting to protect their sensitive and confidential data,” said Rishabh Poddar, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Opaque Systems. “We’re excited to have the experience Aaron brings to the company and this will allow me to be even more focused on accelerating the innovation of our product and ensuring Opaque makes it easy for companies to embed privacy into their workflows.”

Opaque also launched OpaquePrompts for early access, a new product feature that serves as a privacy layer for large language models (LLMs), enabling users to hide personal and sensitive data from LLM providers while in adherence with applicable laws and policies. With current technologies, much data remains unusable due to regulations and sensitivity concerns. It requires significant effort to unlock. This is in addition to Opaque Analytics, which enables customers to quickly realize the value of confidential data with analytics and machine learning on datasets that remain encrypted throughout the entire life cycle, including during processing.

About Opaque Systems

Commercializing the open-source MC2 technology invented at UC Berkeley by its founders, Opaque Systems provides the first collaborative analytics and AI platform for Confidential Computing and Data Clean Rooms. Opaque uniquely enables data to be securely shared and analyzed by multiple parties while maintaining complete confidentiality and protecting data end-to-end. The Opaque Platform leverages a novel combination of two key technologies layered on top of state-of-the-art cloud security—secure hardware enclaves and cryptographic fortification. This combination ensures that the overall computation is secure, fast, and scalable. For more information on Opaque Systems, please visit https://opaque.co/.