Zama, an open-source cryptography company, has raised $73 million in a Series A funding round. The round was co-led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs, with participation from other investors such as Metaplanet, Blockchange Ventures, Vsquared Ventures, and Stake Capital. Notable angel investors also joined the round, including Filecoin founder Juan Benet, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, and Ethereum co-founder and Polkadot co-creator Gavin Wood.
Zama raised the funding over the past two years in two tranches. This equity round brings the total funding for Zama to over $80 million. As part of the Series A round, Filecoin’s Juan Benet and Multicoin’s Kyle Samani have joined Zama’s board of directors.
Zama is a cryptography company founded by Rand Hindi and Pascal Paillier in early 2020. Pascal Paillier is a renowned cryptographer and one of the inventors of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) technology. FHE enables end-to-end data encryption even during processing.
With FHE technology, applications can perform operations on encrypted data and produce encrypted responses that only users can access. Zama’s technology is not yet ready for large-scale applications like ChatGPT but is well-suited for the crypto and blockchain space. Zama has developed fhEVM, a confidential smart contract protocol that allows developers to build privacy-preserving applications on Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) blockchains.
Zama plans to continue researching and developing its FHE tools with the new funding. The company aims to achieve another 1,000x performance improvement to support larger applications. Zama already has hundreds of customers in the pipeline for its technology and expects rapid adoption.
The team at Zama consists of 75 people with expertise in cryptography, machine learning, and blockchain technology. Half of the team holds PhDs in their respective fields. Zama plans to hire more people in the future to expand its business and ecosystem.
In addition to serving the blockchain industry, Zama is also developing solutions for the artificial intelligence, healthcare, financial services, and governmental security sectors. The company envisions a world where data privacy is guaranteed by design.
In summary, Zama has raised $73 million in a Series A funding round led by Multicoin Capital and Protocol Labs. The company offers FHE technology that enables end-to-end data encryption and has developed fhEVM, a smart contract protocol for privacy-preserving applications on EVM blockchains. With the new funding, Zama plans to further develop its tools and expand into various industries while ensuring data privacy is a priority.
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