Paris-based Cryptography Startup Zama Secures €49 Million In Series B Round

Zama is building Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions for blockchain, allowing data to be processed securely without ever being decrypted.

The new funding will help support the launch of Zama’s mainnet and drive adoption across its ecosystem. The round was co-led by U.S.-based firms Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital. With this latest investment, Zama’s total funding now exceeds €129 million, and its valuation has crossed the $1 billion mark.

“With this latest raise, Zama becomes the world’s first unicorn in the FHE space, which is a major milestone for the industry. Reaching a $1 billion valuation represents a significant increase that reflects the market’s confidence in our FHE technology and our team’s ability to deliver confidentiality to financial applications onchain,” said Dr Rand Hindi, CEO and Co-founder of Zama. “The Series B round was structured to bring strategic blockchain investors into Zama’s ecosystem, focusing on partnership value rather than capital ahead of the launch of our mainnet and token.”

Zama is seeing rapid adoption, with over 5,000 developers already using its FHE libraries.

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This latest funding aligns with the launch of Zama’s Confidential Blockchain Protocol and its public testnet. Developers can now begin building confidential applications, starting with Ethereum via Zama’s FHEVM. Support for other EVM chains and Solana is expected by 2026.

“Zama’s Fully Homomorphic Encryption protocol launch is a cryptography milestone. By enabling efficient, developer-friendly FHE, Zama unlocks secure, compliant, and verifiable dApps for AI, crypto, and cloud,” said Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera. “The protocol paves the way for onchain identity, financial, and consumer applications – previously out of reach for developers.”

The Zama Protocol allows developers to build confidential dApps without needing expertise in cryptography. With Zama’s FHEVM smart contracts can run directly on encrypted data, ensuring both privacy and composability. This blockchain-native confidentiality unlocks powerful new use cases:

For on-chain finance, financial institutions can now use public blockchains for secure applications like confidential stablecoin payments, asset tokenisation, and regulatory compliance.

Confidential tokens can also be issued, keeping balances and transactions private. This protects investors, team members, and holders from public exposure and security risks.

In identity and proof of humanity, Zama helps verify whether a user is human without revealing their identity—an important feature for protecting on-chain systems from AI misuse.

Finally, the protocol supports confidential operations for network states and digital communities, making it possible to manage identity, currency, governance, and registries securely on public blockchains.

“Zama is commercializing an entirely new generational technology that could redefine how confidentiality is handled in the blockchain and, ultimately, in all of cloud computing,” said Ken Seiff, Co-Managing Partner of Blockchange Ventures. “This is our third and largest investment in Zama. Not since I first saw Ethereum in 2014, have I seen a company commercialising an entirely new technology that could be as foundational to our global technology infrastructure.

“As finance moves onchain and regulations tighten globally, public blockchains are likely to be the first beneficiaries of what Zama is building. But the opportunity goes well beyond that, as industries such as health care, defense, and virtually all others that use cloud computing could massively benefit from the stepchange in confidentiality and compliance pioneered by FHE, and in particular, Zama.”​

Zama will use the new funding to push the boundaries of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) and make it more accessible for blockchain and broader applications. To achieve this, the company is actively working on overcoming the main barriers that have slowed FHE adoption.

Speed is a key focus—Zama’s FHE technology is now reportedly 100x faster than when the company started and already supports most on-chain payment use cases. Over the next five years, they aim to make it 100x more scalable to handle even the most complex blockchain applications.

Hardware integration is also underway. By using GPUs, Zama can already process hundreds of transactions per second. The team is now developing a dedicated FHE chip to further boost performance, with a long-term goal of reaching tens of thousands of transactions per second.

Developer usability is central to Zama’s mission. Developers don’t need to learn new languages—instead, they can continue using tools like Solidity and deploy on their preferred blockchain.

“We believe that ultimately most blockchain transactions will need to be confidential. Our mainnet is coming, and this testnet gives developers early access to FHE so they can start building and exploring this technology for these applications. We’ve worked hard to remove the historical barriers around performance and accessibility, and now we’re focused on getting this technology into the hands of builders and real-world products” added Hindi. “This round also underscores a broader shift: confidentiality is no longer a niche concern – it’s a foundational requirement. The broad adoption of blockchain in finance is driving demand for secure, confidential computing technologies.”

About Zama

Founded in 2024 by Dr. Pascal Paillier and Dr. Rand Hindi, Zama is an open-source cryptography company developing Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solutions for the blockchain space. Their technology powers use cases like confidential finance, Web3 applications, and network states.