The company will use the new funding to support its mainnet launch, ecosystem adoption and research efforts to make financial transactions built with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scale to thousands of transactions per second, according to a Wednesday (June 25) press release emailed to PYMNTS.
FHE enables data processing without decryption, so encryption is maintained during both transit and processing, according to an article on Zama’s website. That means “all online activities can now be truly end-to-end encrypted,” the article said.
The company’s Series B round brings Zama’s total funding to $150 million and its valuation to $1 billion, according to the Wednesday release.
“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 CEO and Co-founder Rand Hindi said in the release.
The round was led by Blockchange Ventures and Pantera Capital, per the release.
Blockchange Ventures Co-Managing Partner Ken Seiff said in the release that Zama’s FHE solutions are likely to benefit public blockchains first but could benefit any industry that uses cloud computing and requires greater confidentiality and compliance.
“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,” Seiff said.
Pantera Capita Managing Partner Paul Veradittakit said in the release that Zama’s FHE protocol is efficient and developer-friendly and supports decentralized applications (dApps) for artificial intelligence, crypto and cloud.
“The protocol paves the way for on-chain identity, financial and consumer applications — previously out of reach for developers,” Veradittakit said.
Zama’s Series B came about 15 months after a March 2024 Series A funding round in which the company raised $73 million to grow its FHE solution.
Hindi said at the time that Zama was formed four years earlier and dedicated to FHE, which he said is the “holy grail of cryptography.”
