Locktera Joins NVIDIA Inception to Advance Confidential AI and FHE-Powered Secure RAG

Executive Summary: Locktera has joined NVIDIA Inception to accelerate the development and commercialization of its confidential AI technologies, including Locktera Secure RAG. Powered by Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), Secure RAG enables organizations to search and rank encrypted data without decrypting searchable vectors during computation. Initial benchmarks demonstrate encrypted search datasets containing up to one million vectors with execution times measured in seconds. Through NVIDIA Inception, Locktera aims to advance GPU acceleration, scalability, and enterprise deployment, helping organizations securely integrate sensitive information into existing AI applications without compromising data confidentiality.

Dallas, Texas — October 7, 2026 — Locktera, a developer of confidential AI and persistent data security technologies, today announced that it has joined NVIDIA Inception, a program designed to help startups accelerate innovation and growth through technical resources, expertise, and business development opportunities.

The announcement comes as Locktera advances Locktera Secure RAG, a privacy-preserving AI technology that uses Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to perform vector similarity search and ranking directly on encrypted data. The technology addresses a fundamental challenge in enterprise AI adoption: enabling organizations to search sensitive information without exposing plaintext vector representations to the infrastructure performing the search.

“The next generation of enterprise AI must be able to work with sensitive information without requiring organizations to expose that information to the infrastructure performing the computation,” said Dr. Jean Achterberg, CEO of Locktera. “Our work in Fully Homomorphic Encryption is focused on making confidential search practical at enterprise scale. Joining NVIDIA Inception will help us accelerate that mission.”

Making Confidential AI Practical at Enterprise Scale

As organizations increasingly adopt AI assistants, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and intelligent search applications, protecting sensitive information throughout AI workflows has become a critical security challenge.

Traditional vector search architectures generally process unencrypted vector representations. While confidential computing technologies can protect information within hardware-isolated environments, Locktera Secure RAG takes a different approach by performing similarity search and private Top-K ranking on encrypted vectors without decrypting them during the protected computation.

This distinction allows Locktera to address data confidentiality at the cryptographic level while remaining complementary to confidential computing and existing AI inference platforms.

Locktera Secure RAG is designed to integrate with enterprise AI applications and existing infrastructure, enabling organizations to introduce confidential retrieval capabilities without replacing their established AI models or cloud environments.

Advancing High-Performance Encrypted Search

Historically, the computational overhead associated with Fully Homomorphic Encryption has presented challenges for large-scale commercial applications.

Locktera is working to overcome these limitations through optimized encrypted vector search and accelerated computing architectures.

Initial benchmarks have demonstrated encrypted similarity search across datasets containing up to one million vectors, with execution times measured in seconds rather than minutes. These results represent an important step toward making FHE-powered confidential search practical for enterprise AI workloads.

The company is continuing to optimize performance, scalability, and production deployment capabilities.

Accelerating Development Through NVIDIA Inception

Through NVIDIA Inception, Locktera gains access to resources designed to help startups accelerate product development and business growth, including technical training, developer resources, and opportunities to engage with NVIDIA’s broader technology ecosystem.

Locktera intends to leverage these resources to advance GPU-accelerated confidential search, Secure RAG integration, AI model integrity protection, and scalable privacy-preserving AI architectures.

“Security should not require organizations to sacrifice the performance needed for practical AI applications,” added Achterberg. “Our goal is to combine strong cryptographic protection with the speed, scalability, and flexibility enterprises expect, making confidential AI accessible within existing technology environments.”

Extending Security Across the AI Data Lifecycle

Locktera Secure RAG builds upon the company’s broader persistent data security platform, which combines file-level encryption, policy-based access control, cryptographic integrity protection, and comprehensive auditing.

Together, these technologies are designed to help organizations protect sensitive information before, during, and after AI processing, including controlling access to retrieved content and protecting valuable AI model artifacts against unauthorized modification.

Locktera’s approach is particularly relevant to organizations handling confidential or regulated information, including healthcare, financial services, government, defense, and research institutions.

About Locktera

Locktera is a Dallas, Texas-based technology company specializing in confidential AI and persistent data security. Its solutions help organizations protect sensitive information across cloud, hybrid, and enterprise environments through file-level encryption, persistent access controls, cryptographic integrity protection, and comprehensive auditing.

The company’s technology portfolio includes Locktera Secure RAG, FHE-powered confidential search, AI model security, encrypted data storage, secure document sharing, and developer security APIs.

Locktera is a Microsoft ISV partner and Databricks Technology Partner, with solutions available through Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

For more information, visit https://locktera.com.

About NVIDIA Inception

NVIDIA Inception is a program designed to help startups accelerate technical innovation and business growth through access to resources, technical expertise, and ecosystem opportunities.

Learn more at https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/startups/.

Media Contact
Locktera
Dallas, Texas
Website: https://locktera.com
Email: media@locktera.com