Partisia, an EIC Accelerator Winner, Bets on Private Digital ID

In January 2008 Danish farmers sold their sugar beet contracts to each other in an auction where no single party had access to the individual bids. The role of auctioneer was shared by three parties, representing the sugar producer Danisco, the growers' association DKS and the SIMAP research project, and the price was computed with secure multi-party computation, a branch of cryptography that lets several parties calculate a result from data none of them reveals. The researchers described it in a 2009 paper titled "Secure Multiparty Computation Goes Live", and Partisia, the Aarhus company built on that work, calls it the world's first commercial use of the method.

Eighteen years later, Partisia Applications ApS was selected for blended finance at the EIC Accelerator's 1 October 2025 cut-off, and CORDIS records a grant of €2,499,999 for its project, Partisia Platform, from 1 June 2026 to 31 May 2028. The company now sells identity checks for Europe's new digital identity wallets. It goes into the grant period with the weakest of the five years of accounts shown in its register summary, and under a new chief executive.

One brand, several companies

The grant holder is one entity in a group. The Danish company register shows Partisia Applications ApS was registered in 2018 as Secata ApS and took its current name in April 2020. Its register entry names PARTISIA ApS, registered in 2008, as founding owner, and Partisia Group ApS as the 100% owner since 1 July 2024. The founding board of 2018 had Jakob Pagter as chair and Peter Bogetoft and Jesper Buus Nielsen among its members, with Kurt Nielsen as chief executive; all four are among the authors of the auction paper.

Alongside the Danish companies sits a related blockchain project, Partisia Blockchain. A May 2025 Biometric Update report on a partnership with Japan's Toppan Edge described Kurt Nielsen as both Partisia's chief executive and a co-founder of Partisia Blockchain. What money, if any, flows between the blockchain project and the grant holder is not set out in any source reviewed for this article, so the figures below cover Partisia Applications ApS alone.

The technology: computing on data no one sees

In the 2008 auction, the 2009 paper explains, each bid was kept encrypted from the moment it left the farmer's computer, and no single party had access to the bids at any time, yet the three parties together could compute the market clearing price. The authors wrote that farmers would be reluctant to accept Danisco as auctioneer, given its position in the market, and that paying a consultancy to act as trusted auctioneer would have been very expensive. That is the distinction Partisia still sells: a result computed jointly, with no single operator holding the full data.

The CORDIS summary of the EIC project describes a platform that combines this research with a blockchain, and credits what it calls "true sharding and fast finalization" for speed and scale, with post-quantum cryptography and MPC-based confidential quantum computing listed as further work. The company's own EU funding page describes the same grant agreement, 101297763, more narrowly: a privacy-preserving digital identity platform in which people prove who they are, or that they are old enough, through verifiable credentials without handing over the underlying personal data, aligned with eIDAS 2.0 and aimed at finance, healthcare, age verification and access control.

Pilots in Danish public projects

Partisia's website presents the company as decentralised identity infrastructure for eIDAS 2.0. Under the regulation, every EU member state must offer at least one digital identity wallet by the end of 2026, a timetable set out by law firm Garrigues and repeated in Partisia's own guide. Denmark launched its wallet, AltID, in June 2026. Biometric Update reported that the app was developed by Nine with identity verification from Signicat, and its report does not mention Partisia. Partisia says it worked with the Danish Agency for Digital Government, tested AltID before launch and is listed as a receiver of wallet credentials.

The deployments announced since then are pilots and partnerships:

1. Jun 2026
   Vitani SecurityA partnership linking verified digital identity to physical access control, also reported by SecurityWorldMarket
2. Aug 2026
   Nyt Hospital BispebjergRegion Hovedstaden's property centre is named as project owner of a construction-site solution with Vitani and Partisia, to be implemented over six monthsPilot
3. Sep 2026
   FrontDesk and VejleAn AltID-based arrival registration, with Vejle Municipality as first pilotPilot
4. Sep 2026
   MobaiA memorandum of understanding to explore biometrically secured digital identity, per the company blog

None of these announcements gives a contract value, a user count or a pilot result. The Bispebjerg project is described by both Partisia and SecurityWorldMarket, and the Vitani chief executive, Lars Kornbek, is quoted there calling it a first step rather than a one-off pilot. The FrontDesk and Mobai items rest on Partisia's announcements alone.

The accounts behind the grant

The filed accounts, as summarised by estatistik.dk, show a company that made a profit every year from 2021 to 2023, peaking at DKK 11.6 million in 2023 on a gross profit of DKK 35.1 million. In 2024 it lost DKK 7.0 million. In 2025 gross profit was DKK 1.0 million and the loss DKK 37.5 million, leaving equity of DKK 2.5 million against DKK 31.0 million two years earlier. The summary does not break down revenue, and no explanation for the 2025 figures from the company or its auditor could be found in the sources reviewed.

The parent, Partisia Group ApS, reported a 2025 loss of DKK 38.5 million and equity of DKK 26.5 million, with no employees of its own, according to its register summary. The two losses are reported by different entities and are not added together here. The EIC grant period began after the 2025 year closed, so none of the grant appears in these accounts.

A change at the top

On 17 July 2026 Partisia published an obituary for Kurt Nielsen, its co-founder and chief executive, and on 2 August it announced that the board had unanimously appointed Mark Medum Bundgaard, previously chief product officer, as chief executive. The register records Bundgaard as chief executive from 1 August 2026 and a new board chair, Peter Frands Frandsen, from 31 July. No independent obituary could be found by search. The announcement states the company's mission as unchanged and gives no headcount or funding details.

What the EIC project promised

The project is five months into a 24-month grant period, and the CORDIS page, last updated on 3 June 2026, carries the objective and funding figures only. What can already be checked is whether the products the project points to exist and whether the pilots are real.

1. Identity products for eIDAS 2.0ExistsVisitorPass, SitePass, AgeVerify and credential APIs are listed on the company website.
2. Use with a national walletClaimedPartisia says it is an AltID credential receiver; the launch coverage reviewed does not name it.
3. Customers in target sectorsPilotsBispebjerg and Vejle pilots announced; no contract value or results published.
4. €152M revenue and 168 new staff by 2032Too earlyTarget set in CORDIS; 2025 gross profit was DKK 1.0M with 19 staff today.

Why the EU funds it

The European Digital Identity Regulation obliges every member state to offer a wallet, and Partisia's website notes that regulated sectors such as banking and telecoms must accept the wallet by December 2027 where strong authentication is required. Every one of those services needs software to verify credentials on its side of the transaction, and the CORDIS summary frames the project around organisations that struggle to use sensitive data while complying with privacy rules such as the GDPR. Partisia says it co-authored the EU's Architecture and Reference Framework for the wallet; that claim appears on its website and was not checked against the framework's published author list for this article.

Partisia was not asked for comment for this article. The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.