Zama Raises $73 Million to Expand Encryption Solution

Zama, a specialist in the field of cryptography, has secured $73 million in a Series A funding round to grow its Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) solution.

The company will use the new funding to advance its research, extend its runway and champion its partners who are venturing into production with FHE today, Rand Hindi, co-founder and CEO at Zama, said in a Thursday (March 7) blog post.

Zama has been dedicated to FHE — which Hindi said is the “holy grail of cryptography” — since the company’s inception four years ago, according to the post.

Initially, FHE was a complex, theoretical construct, characterized by its sluggish performance, high costs and a steep learning curve, limiting its practical applications, the post said. However, Zama has chipped away at these barriers, propelling FHE into the realm of widespread accessibility for developers with varying levels of cryptography expertise.

Today, Zama offers a suite of open-source FHE libraries and solutions that promise out-of-the-box, end-to-end encryption for applications, regardless of their complexity, per the post. This has enabled developers globally to secure their applications.

A significant milestone for Zama has been the improvement of its FHE scheme’s speed by a factor of 20x, with aspirations to elevate this to 100x in the near horizon, according to the post. This leap in performance will unlock the potential for confidential blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) use cases.

Looking to the future, Zama’s roadmap includes the introduction of dedicated FHE hardware accelerators, poised to revolutionize web-scale applications such as confidential large language models (LLMs) and encrypted software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, the post said.

Seeing blockchain as fertile ground for growth this year, Zama has introduced the fhEVM, a confidential smart contract solution enabling the development of private onchain applications in Solidity, per the post.

Moreover, Zama’s endeavors extend beyond blockchain, with plans to revolutionize AI, according to the post. Using its Concrete framework, Zama is making it feasible to train and run AI models on encrypted data, paving the way for confidential AI applications.

Moving forward, Zama is focused on simplifying the use of FHE for developers, boosting FHE performance, and encrypting cloud applications and the broader internet through an FHE-powered “HTTPZ” protocol, per the post.

“Blockchain and AI are just the start,” Hindi said in the post. “Our long-term goal is to make the entire internet encrypted end-to-end.”

PYMNTS Intelligence has found that consumers in the United States and Australia said data security concerns would be the No. 1 barrier preventing them from adopting an “everyday app” that would help them manage chores ranging from banking to bill paying to shopping.

Sixty-four percent of the consumers surveyed said they “felt uneasy about an everyday app’s ability to safeguard personal and financial information,” according to “Consumer Interest in an Everyday App,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and PayPal collaboration.