Zama, an open-source cryptography company specializing in Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), has announced a successful $73m Series A funding round, one of the largest of its kind in France’s history.
This monumental investment was co-led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs, with notable contributions from Metaplanet, Blockchange, VSquared, Stake Capital, and Portal Ventures. Additionally, several key figures in the blockchain and AI industries, including Juan Benet of Filecoin/IPFS, Gavin Wood of Ethereum/Polkadot, Anatoly Yakovenko of Solana, Julien Bouteloup of StakeDAO, and Tarun Chitra of Gauntlet, have joined as strategic investors.
Zama’s mission revolves around making the internet fully encrypted from end to end using FHE, often considered the “holy grail” of cryptography. Four years after its inception, Zama has significantly advanced the practical application of FHE. Initially, FHE was largely theoretical, plagued by issues of speed, cost, and complexity. However, through the team’s relentless efforts, these challenges have been addressed, making FHE accessible to developers without a deep background in cryptography for the first time.
The company provides a comprehensive suite of open-source FHE libraries and solutions. These tools allow anyone, from individual developers to large corporations, to implement end-to-end encrypted applications. Zama’s FHE scheme, built upon TFHE, supports a wide array of applications, significantly expanding FHE’s applicability across various sectors.
With the new funding, Zama plans to accelerate its research and development, focusing on enhancing the performance and usability of its FHE solutions. The company has already achieved a 20x improvement in the speed of its FHE scheme, with goals to reach a 100x increase soon. This improvement is crucial for unlocking confidential blockchain and AI use cases. Zama also anticipates the release of dedicated FHE hardware accelerators, which will further enable web-scale applications, including confidential Large Language Models (LLMs) and encrypted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings.
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