Megan Harper
In December 2025, the Spanish-Belgian deeptech startup Wodan AI closed a €2 million Pre-Seed funding round. The investment was led by a coalition of Spanish funds—JME Ventures, Swanlaab, and Adara Ventures—with participation from Belgium’s ScaleFund.
The company is led by CEO Bob Dubois and CTO Manuel Pérez Yllán. Wodan AI is solving the “privacy vs. utility” deadlock that prevents regulated industries from adopting Generative AI.
Current AI deployments typically require sending data to the cloud in plain text, which is a non-starter for banks, healthcare providers, and defense agencies under strict GDPR laws. Wodan AI addresses this using Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), a breakthrough technology that allows Machine Learning models and LLMs to process data while it remains encrypted. This means sensitive information is never exposed—not in transit, not at rest, and critically, not even during processing.
The new capital will be used to relocate its headquarters to Madrid, creating a new R&D hub focused on scaling “sovereign” AI infrastructure that guarantees mathematical privacy for Europe’s most critical sectors.
Market Signal
- The “Holy Grail” of Encryption: FHE has long been theoretically possible but computationally too slow for real-world use. This round signals that FHE is finally hitting “commercial viability,” allowing companies to perform AI inference on data they don’t own (or can’t see) without breaking compliance.
- European Tech Sovereignty: Wodan’s move to Madrid and its backing by specialized Spanish VCs highlights a macro trend: Europe is building its own “Privacy-First” AI stack. Rather than competing with OpenAI on model size, European startups are competing on trust and data governance, aiming to become the Swiss Bank of the AI era.
- Unblocking the “Sensitive” 80%: It is estimated that 80% of enterprise data is too sensitive to be fed into public LLMs. Wodan AI’s infrastructure unlocks this massive dormant dataset, enabling banks to run fraud detection or hospitals to analyze patient records using external AI models without ever revealing the underlying secrets.
Key Details
- Company: Wodan AI
- Funding: €2M Pre-Seed
- Headquarters: Madrid, Spain (relocated from Belgium)
- Lead Investors: JME Ventures, Swanlaab, Adara Ventures
- Founders: Bob Dubois (CEO), Manuel Pérez Yllán (CTO)
- Use Case: Sovereign AI infrastructure and Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)
