Adara Ventures has announced an investment in Wodan AI, a Spanish-Belgian deep-tech company building the infrastructure layer for secure and private artificial intelligence operations.
The €2 million pre-seed funding round was led by JME Ventures, Swanlaab, and Adara Ventures, with participation from ScaleFund.
The challenge: AI adoption is outpacing AI security
Enterprise adoption of artificial intelligence is accelerating rapidly, particularly in highly regulated and data-sensitive sectors such as financial services, healthcare, defence, and public administration.
However, most AI systems today still require data to be decrypted during training or inference, exposing sensitive information to infrastructure providers, model operators, and potential attackers.
This creates a growing and systemic cyber risk. Nearly all organisations rely on third-party providers, and AI inference platforms handling sensitive data have become high-value attack surfaces.
At the same time, new regulations such as the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) explicitly mandate stronger protections, including the encryption of data-in-use.
Wodan: AI that runs on encrypted data
Wodan addresses this challenge at its core. The company has developed a platform that enables Machine Learning, Computer Vision, and Large Language Models (LLMs) to operate directly on encrypted data, without ever decrypting it at any stage of the workflow.
At the heart of Wodan’s technology is Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). This allows data owners to encrypt their data locally, send it to an AI model for training or inference, and decrypt only the final result—ensuring that neither the AI provider nor the underlying infrastructure ever sees the raw data.
Wodan’s platform enables:
The result is end-to-end protection for both data and algorithms, enabling AI deployment in environments where it was previously considered too risky.
An experienced founding team at the intersection of AI and enterprise security
Wodan was founded by Bob Dubois (CEO) and Manuel Pérez Yllán (CTO). Bob brings over two decades of experience in enterprise sales and digital transformation roles at companies such as Red Hat, Commvault, and Filecoin. Manuel is a serial AI entrepreneur, machine learning expert, and professor with deep expertise in cryptography and applied AI systems.
This combination of commercial execution and deep technical knowledge positions Wodan strongly to tackle one of the most complex challenges in AI infrastructure.
A platform vision for secure AI at scale
Wodan’s ambition extends beyond point solutions. The team is building what it describes as the “Hugging Face of secure models”: a platform where organisations can securely train, deploy, and share AI models while preserving data privacy and regulatory compliance.
The company is initially focused on financial services, where AI adoption is high but security constraints are particularly acute. Early traction includes pilot projects with financial institutions, with plans to expand into healthcare, legal, defence, government, and other sectors handling highly sensitive data.
This investment will enable Wodan to strengthen its team and technological infrastructure, and to position itself as a leading European player in secure and private AI—an increasingly strategic area for the European Union’s digital autonomy.
The Adara perspective: Fully Homomorphic Encryption as critical AI infrastructure
At Adara Ventures, Fully Homomorphic Encryption is viewed as no longer a purely theoretical breakthrough, but as a commercially viable technology addressing one of the most urgent risks in modern AI systems.
By enabling ML, LLM, and Computer Vision models to operate on encrypted rather than decrypted data, Wodan makes it possible to deploy AI with end-to-end cybersecure operations. This fundamentally changes the AI threat model: even if infrastructure is compromised, sensitive data and model interactions remain protected.
Recent cyberattacks on inference providers and AI platforms handling sensitive data highlight how exposed today’s AI stack has become—a trend that will only accelerate as AI adoption grows. Wodan is seen as an infrastructure-level solution that addresses this expanding attack surface at the point where it matters most: data-in-use.
Wodan’s approach strongly aligns with Adara’s thesis around deep, defensible technologies that enable the safe deployment of AI in mission-critical environments. With strong technical foundations, regulatory tailwinds, and a clear platform vision, Wodan is well positioned to become a cornerstone of secure AI infrastructure in Europe and beyond.
Learn more: www.wodan.ai
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