[Funding alert] Paris-based Zama Secures $73 Million in Series A Round Funding

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). This round brings together the brightest minds in the industry to work toward a singular goal: making FHE ubiquitous in blockchain and AI.

Four years ago, they founded Zama as an open source cryptography company focused on FHE, the “holy grail of cryptography.” At that time, FHE was more theoretical math than practical code—it was too slow, too expensive, required too much cryptography expertise, and could only support a handful of real-world applications.

In the years that followed—largely thanks to the relentless efforts of their team—they methodically tackled each of these problems, making FHE generally accessible to non-cryptography developers for the first time. I’m incredibly proud of this work. It alone is a significant achievement.

Today, Zama offers a robust suite of open source FHE libraries and solutions. Anyone, from solo developers to large enterprises, can build applications that deliver out-of-the-box, end-to-end encryption to their users.

Developers don’t need to know anything about cryptography to get started. Their FHE scheme, which builds on top of TFHE, supports any type of application, no matter how complex, vastly expanding the applicability of FHE.

Alongside security and developer experience, they maintained an unrelenting focus on performance. Since inception, they have improved the speed of their FHE scheme by a factor of 20x, and are on track to reach 100x soon. This key performance milestone has unlocked critical confidential blockchain and AI use cases.

Dedicated FHE hardware accelerators, which are coming in the next two years, will bridge the final gap to enable web-scale applications such as confidential Large Language Models (LLMs) and encrypted Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

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In addition to advancing their research, this funding gives us several years of runway and the necessary resources to support their partners that are going into production with FHE today. While their partners span a wide cross section of industries, they found blockchain to be a key market for Zama to focus on this year.

A major issue with blockchain is that all transactions and data are publicly visible, creating a challenge for developers of applications that require using sensitive information, such as personal or financial data. To address this, they created the fhEVM, a confidential smart contract solution that enables developers to create confidential onchain applications in Solidity.

About Zama

Zama is an open-source cryptography startup creating cutting-edge Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) blockchain and artificial intelligence solutions. They think privacy should not be a concern for people. Not because it is unimportant, but because it ought not to be a problem!

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The complexity of conducting private internet transactions is rising, from blockchain smart contracts that make everything public to data breaches and cloud application surveillance.