Trustonic

Trustonic builds and licenses a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) — a hardware-isolated, physically separate secure area of a device’s main processor, built on Arm TrustZone technology, that stores and processes sensitive data (biometric templates, payment credentials, DRM keys, derived identity credentials) completely walled off from the main Android operating system. Because the TEE runs its own secure operating system independent of Android, an attacker who compromises the main OS still cannot reach data or code running inside it, which is why device manufacturers, mobile carriers, automakers, and financial institutions build payment, authentication, and content-protection features on top of it rather than relying on OS-level protections alone.

Trustonic was formed in 2012 as a joint venture between Arm, Gemalto, and Giesecke & Devrient, combining Arm’s TrustZone silicon technology with security and management software from its two co-founders. The joint-venture structure struggled financially for years, and in 2020 Arm sold its stake, with EMK Capital acquiring full ownership; Trustonic is now an independent, private equity-backed company headquartered in Cambridge, UK with more than 100 employees. Its TEE technology is reported to be embedded in more than 2 billion devices and is used by 9 of the top 10 Android device manufacturers, giving it an unusually deep, if largely invisible, footprint in the mobile device supply chain.

Trustonic’s business model is licensing foundational security infrastructure to device makers and service providers rather than selling a product directly to enterprise security buyers, which makes its relevance indirect: CISOs are more likely to depend on Trustonic’s TEE through the devices and payment/authentication SDKs their organizations already use than to procure it directly.