Paris-based Startup Zama Raises $73 Million for Advancing Homomorphic Encryption Technology

Paris-based startup Zama announced today that it has secured $73 million in a Series A funding round led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs, with participation from Metaplanet, Blockchange, VSquared, Stake Capital and Portal Ventures, as well as several other strategic founders, including Juan Benet (Filecoin/IPFS), Gavin Wood (Ethereum/Polkadot), Anatoly Yakovenko (Solana), Julien Bouteloup (StakeDAO), and Tarun Chitra (Gauntlet). The company plans to allocate the funds to further research and development, as well as expand its engineering team to capitalize on the market opportunities it has identified. 

Zama's technology addresses blockchain transactions and solutions for data exchange related to artificial intelligence training and usage.  The company's technology is focused on homomorphic encryption (FHE), the “holy grail of cryptography" and  has attracted attention due to its potential to revolutionize data security. Per TechCrunch, the startup has already commercialized its offerings, signing contracts valued at over $50 million mostly from the blockchain sector. 

Zama's CEO Rand Hindi elaborated:

Blockchain and AI are just the start. Our long term goal is to make the entire internet encrypted end-to-end. Here is our masterplan:

• First, make FHE extremely easy to use for developers, no matter their use case.
• Second, make FHE extremely fast, scaling confidential blockchains to 1,000+ transactions per second and generating dozens of encrypted LLM tokens per second.
• Third, bring FHE to cloud applications, from databases to SaaS.
• Finally, make the entire internet encrypted end-to-end via a new, FHE-powered “HTTPZ” protocol.