Zama Advances FHE Tech with $73M Funding Round

Zama, a firm that specializes in FHE secures $73 million in Series A funding, led by Multicoin Capital, aiming to enhance data security.

With participation from Juan Benet (founder of Filecoin), Anatoly Yakovenko (co-founder of Solana), and Gavin Wood (co-founder of Ethereum and Polkadot), the open-source cryptography company Zama raised $73 million in a Series A funding round. The round was led by Multicoin Capital, Protocol Labs, Metaplanet, Blockchange Ventures, Vsquared Ventures, and Stake Capital.

With this equity round, Zama has raised more than $80 million. With the help of the mega round, which has been split into two installments over the last two years, they hope to continue developing its Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) technologies.

In addition, they plan to develop its business and ecosystem in the next months and expand its workforce with the new money it acquired.

Zama uses FHE technology so businesses may serve customers without gaining access to their data, which reduces security threats. For blockchains that are compatible with Ethereum, the most recent offering from the firm is fhEVM, a protocol for secret smart contracts. Data stored on the blockchain is protected from end-to-end encryption by this protocol. At this time, fhEVM can work with blockchains that use the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM).

Since its inception in the research phase, Zama has significantly improved its performance by a factor of 100. For more demanding applications, the business is pushing for a performance boost of 1,000x.

In the Field of FHE Technology, Zama is at the Front

Zama is an open-source cryptography firm that has been around since 2020 and focuses on creating FHE solutions that are compatible with blockchain technology and AI. They’re dedicated to promoting FHE, which is sometimes called the “holy grail” of cryptography since it can guarantee end-to-end data encryption even during processing. Renowned cryptographer Pascal Paillier was one of the pioneers of this technique.

Inco, a developer of modular blockchain technology, Fhenix, a developer of Layer 2 technology, and the people behind the Shiba Inu memecoin were among the projects that used Zama’s FHE technology. They are creating blockchain-related technologies, but they are also making unique solutions for many other areas, such as healthcare, financial services, artificial intelligence, and government security.

Zama plans to use the new funding to improve FHE technology, putting it in a better position to lead the cryptographic innovation pack.